by Barry Miles
In October 1982, at the Final Academy, a conference/celebration of Burroughs and his work in London, the BBC approached Burroughs to film the event or at least film him with Francis Bacon for their arts documentary series Arena. They were told they had to use Brookner’s footage, to which they reluctantly agreed, and they flew Brookner to London to see the rushes and discuss it. Alan Yentob, Nigel Finch, and Anthony Wall filmed a new interview with Burroughs with BBC staffer John Waters in Lawrence, and filmed him with Francis Bacon. They did rostrum shots of Burroughs’s books—which is why there are British editions in the film—added a bit of honky-tonk music, and dropped in sections of Antony Balch’s sixties footage from Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups. They transmitted it in February 1983. Brookner was so relieved to have the film completed that he used the BBC TV edit exactly as it was when he released the film for theatrical exhibition in the United States six months later.
Frank Zappa was interested in doing a musical of Naked Lunch, and on September 12, 1979, he took Burroughs to see The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, a musical that had run for over a year. Had it come to anything it would have caused some unpleasantness with Brion, whose film script for Naked Lunch contained a number of songs that Bill absolutely hated, one of the main reasons he was so lukewarm about the project. Bill had not seen a musical in years and enjoyed it.
Burroughs was then spending a lot of time with Stew Meyer, who acted very much as his personal assistant. Stew drove him to and from the airport, scored dope, and ran errands. It was a very druggy period. Stew kept a diary record of events:
Friday October 5th 1979
Giorno called the office late afternoon tells me dinner with Bill is set for six. I left reefer at home but Al gave me some gummy strong shish and I picked up a few glassines for me’n the Old Doc on Rivington just east of Houston Street. The Puerto Rican social clubs are lined up on that block. Thriving marketplace for coke, dope, and street yerba.
Thursday October 25th 1979
Bill: “Put that coke away we don’t have to feed every vagrant nostril in town.” I put it away before the guests arrived.
John Giorno has pointed out that Bill’s fame may have actually saved his life. Many of the junkies he was shooting up with in the Bunker were also gay, and several of them, including Howard Brookner, subsequently died of AIDS. Burroughs’s seniority meant that he always got the first shot, so he always had a clean needle and was never exposed to the blood of the other people using the same works.
Bill’s affair with Cabell Hardy was coming to a close. Though William Burroughs Communications was now based in Kansas, James still had to make visits to New York, where he stayed at the Bunker. Bill was traveling a lot and had allowed Cabell and Poppy to stay at the Bunker, but as James couldn’t stand Cabell and found it impossible to work around him, Bill had to ask him to leave. Cabell threw a crying fit over the phone but pulled himself together and left. He and Poppy moved into a place above Howard Brookner at 4 Bleecker Street. Bill saw him occasionally but they had definitively broken up and there was no emotional involvement. By now Cabell had become very deeply involved with Poppy and was very dependent on her. His hysteria and craziness persisted, and there were noisy scenes all day long. Brookner reported that he would sometimes hear Cabell screaming curses at Poppy and then find out that Cabell had been alone.
In December Cabell called to say that Poppy needed an abortion and asked Bill for money. Burroughs expressed a certain amount of skepticism since he knew that Cabell was hustling for junk but told him to come over to the Bunker. “When he came in the door it was just something awful, his face was a thing to see, it was sort of peeled, I’ve never seen a more horrible expression on anyone’s face. I wish I’d had a hidden camera to take that face. The hate in that face was something. You had to step back from it, it was so awful.”
Cabell said, “I see you don’t believe in her pregnancy, you don’t care anything about her pain.”
Bill replied, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I understand that there’s pain involved.” He gave him fifty dollars. Cabell grabbed the money and said, “There’s something for you to read, you won’t like it, but it’s the truth.” It was a ten-page rant that he had clearly spent all night composing, “so full of sick hate” that Bill couldn’t read it all. He skipped about in it, then destroyed it. “It was unbelievable, it made you physically sick to read it. Of course a hysteric’s hate is very disconcerting because there’s no limits on their hate, it just concentrates. It’s always very frightening to encounter that hate.”3 Most of the letter was directed against James, who had become an obsession with Cabell because he felt that he should be occupying James’s place. He told Bill, “Don’t you realize that James is just waiting around for you to die?”
The day after Christmas, a week after the letter, James fell off his bicycle and broke his jaw. It was wired shut for four weeks. To Burroughs this was clearly the result of a curse, the direct result of Cabell’s scream of hatred. He told Ted Morgan, “I was appalled by this outburst of absolutely demonic hate but I didn’t really blame Cabell personally because all hysterics are very subject to possession. They can be possessed by something and you ask them about it later they don’t even remember it, and this was an obvious demonic possession by something that had come in and taken over Cabell Hardy completely.” As soon as Bill heard what happened he asked John Giorno, “Please do not invite Cabell to your New Year party.” Burroughs could hear Cabell saying, “I hope you choke on it.” And it turned out that someone did. It was Carl Laszlo, whom Bill and Brion had stayed with in Basel, who was visiting New York.
A roll call of Beat Generation and downtown luminaries had gathered at John’s loft for New Year dinner: Allen Ginsberg; Anne Waldman; Udo Breger; Carl Laszlo and his two boyfriends, both called Michael; Herbert Huncke; Louis Cartwright; Lucien Carr; Victor Bockris; and Stewart Meyer. The party began in the afternoon when John Giorno, Stew Meyer, and Bill had tea and hashish brownies that Bill had cooked.
Stew Meyer: “Tastes like shit, Bill. What’re these things?”
WSB: “Raisins.”
Stew Meyer: “Tastes like shit with flies in it.”
The brownies were as dry as sandpaper. Bill and John washed them down with vodka and tonic, then they all did a little heroin to hold them for the time it took for the ingested pot to kick in. Bill gave one of his discourses on animals. First he explained that the bedbug is the best hunter on the face of the earth because hunger does not force it to make dangerous moves. It will stay in suspended animation for years if necessary before a suitable meal comes along. Then he praised the “incomparable wolverine! which can shred a man to the bone in nine blood-splattering seconds.” At six o’clock they moved up to John’s loft and the guests began to arrive. Bill began to drink and smoke joints. Dinner was served. Carl began to choke; he went blue in the face, his eyes bulging. One of the Michaels screamed in German, “Do something!” but no one knew what to do. Anne Waldman began praying. The others looked on, aghast. Louis Cartwright attempted the Heimlich maneuver. He reached his arms around Carl from behind and roughly pushed up on his diaphragm, but it didn’t work. Carl looked half dead. Bill got a knife and was preparing to execute an emergency tracheotomy to allow him to breathe when one of the Michaels took over from Louis and executed a perfect abdominal thrust, clearing the steak. Carl stood there trembling, his cigar still in hand. He had shat his pants, so Bill and Stew took him down to the Bunker to clean up and find him some new ones. Bill commented, “I know curses and I know how they work. It was directed at me and it bounced off and hit poor Carl Laszlo, a curse is a very real thing.”4 Bill finished the evening with a speedball (heroin and cocaine). He continued to see Cabell from time to time and they both acted as if the letter had never been written, but Burroughs had been impressed. “The smallest men throw the heaviest curses, and a curse from Cabell Hardy, that is a curse. It’s a curse from a small evil man.”
Cabell began to burn down the city. He
stung a lot of his friends for money for heroin, he bounced checks, he sold heroin that turned out to be baking powder. People began calling Burroughs’s number but he told them that Cabell didn’t live there anymore. They tried to get his address and to bluff him, but Bill explained, “I’m not responsible for this man’s checks. If you’re looking for him, you find him.” When people threatened to go to the police, he said, “Go ahead.” Cabell fled New York.
2. Heroin
The Bunker years were drug years. Virtually everyone Burroughs knew or saw was continually smoking pot, hashish, Thai temple sticks, sniffing or shooting cocaine or heroin or swallowing half-gram balls of opium. They talked endlessly about drugs, comparing the ones they were on now with others taken at other times, remembering spectacular highs and fantasizing about the highs of tomorrow. Burroughs chippied around on his reading tours. One time in Los Angeles, everyone around him was sniffing heroin and he got a light habit. It only took a few days to get him hooked again. After that he went to Toronto for a reading and had to find a doctor to give him some Percodan. He usually traveled with some pinkies5—Codethyline Houdé, available over the counter at any pharmacy in France—because he had a horror of catching flu and not having a serious painkiller with him.
New York was awash with heroin. Howard Brookner brought some to the Bunker, as did Stewart Meyer, and fans came bearing gifts. Soon Bill was fully addicted again. Stew had access to a large quantity of opium through a Mafia connection. It was only available by the kilo, and worked out at about four to five dollars a gram. Burroughs took it throughout the spring of 1980 and by June was stabilized on a gram of opium a day plus street heroin that he shot up. Sometimes he would go with Victor Bockris to visit Tom Sullivan, “the Kid,” a famous drug dealer who arrived in New York with a million dollars and was very generous with his high-end cocaine and heroin. He had a place on the Upper East Side and another in the Village. There were lots of cocaine groupie girls around. But Sullivan got into bad shape and the money ran out. He died at the age of twenty-three.
Bill usually scored through someone else or accompanied people like Howard or Stew. The pushers were in tough competition with each other and all had their own drug brands: there was Black Sunday, the Red, and the Black Is Back, all with different logos on the wrap. Bill was flattered that one on Rivington Street was called Dr. Nova. Bill was never involved in a bad incident, but he knew it was inevitable that if he continued he would encounter some unpleasantness. In addition, he never knew what he was getting: sometimes it was talc, other times a barbiturate, sometimes it would be a good count, other times not. There was always the possibility of getting a bad batch. One shipment from Iran killed a number of people in Paris, and several addicts went blind in New York from it. Bill was getting junk from the same source as one boy who lost his sight. Allen Ginsberg was concerned to find that Bill was addicted again, but Bill told him firmly, “Look Allen, I’m writing and living my life.”6 As Burroughs said, there was no question that if James had been living in New York City he would have protested most vigorously. But James was in Kansas. Bill knew that the situation could not continue indefinitely. Stew Meyer described it: “James was away, the mice were playing. Here we were, William, Howard, and I, three dreamy guys. We all got into trouble. James came back and William ended up in Kansas on methadone […] William back in Kansas ’cause he had been a naughty boy. Ever see that look on his face, facetiously apologetic, about as sincere as a syphilitic choirboy.”7
Bill needed three bags a day minimum, usually four, estimating that a bag was three-quarters of a grain if you were lucky, and a bag was ten dollars. Many people quickly got on a six-bag-a-day habit, which was prohibitively expensive because at that time in New York there was a lot of cocaine mixed in with the heroin and that tended to make people use more heroin in order to smooth out the coke. Bill couldn’t stand cocaine by itself; he hated the teeth-grinding and the poor coordination and would only take it mixed with heroin, methadone, or opium. He said, “If it had been easy and cheap it would have been okay but it wasn’t. It takes a lot of time so when it was suggested to me that I get on the methadone program I did that.”8 He had been stockpiling methadone, bought from Huncke, who was getting a hundred milligrams a day on the program but only using eighty, as a reserve stock in case things got hot and he couldn’t score. Most of Stew’s opium was gone and his connection had changed his name and disappeared, so there was little hope of getting more.
On March 3, 1980, Howard Brookner filmed the only fictional scene in his film about Burroughs. He had arranged to film “The Lavatory Has Been Locked for Six Solid Hours I Think They’re Using It for an Operating Room” in the bathroom of the Bunker, with Bill playing Dr. Benway, Andy Warhol’s transvestite superstar Jackie Curtis playing the nurse, and Stew Meyer playing Dr. Lymph, Dr. Benway’s appalled assistant. Jackie Curtis couldn’t decide which tits to wear and in the end decided that she was female enough already. Bill immersed himself in his role, growling and cursing in his white medic’s coat, splashing stage blood all over himself and the crew.
Bill’s friend Ira Jaffe worked at a methadone maintenance clinic and convinced Bill that being on junk in New York City was not a long-term option. In September 1980 Ira arranged for Burroughs to be treated by Dr. Littleson, who ran the Einstein Medical School clinic way out in the Bronx. Bill would go to her house and she would take him to the clinic. Afterward she was usually able to find someone to drop him at the subway to return to the city, which took about forty-five minutes. Bill liked her but the strain of all that traveling each day was too much for him, so after about ten days she enrolled him in a special celebrity program at 27 East 92nd Street, near Central Park, run by Dr. Harvey Karkus, where well-known actors and public figures went and appointments were timed so that they didn’t run into each other. They asked if he wanted to join under an assumed name, but he declined. He took one urine test and tested positive for heroin and got on the program. For the first three months Bill had to go up there each day; after that he began getting take-homes. It cost a hundred dollars a week (most clinics were between ten and fifty dollars a week), but that was still cheaper than Bill’s habit. He joined the program more from financial necessity than any real desire to come off. His ambivalence was shown one night at the Bunker, as Stew Meyer recorded:
October 9th 1980
Tonight at the Bunker Uncle Bill proclaims; “Junk Is Beautiful! We have been shat upon long enough! Gather yon junkies into a political block of dedicated members always lookin’ for converts! ‘Here kid, try some’a this.’ Soon we will swell into a national or even international power making big demands on the status quo. Give us our medicine! Give it to us cheap! Strong! Ready for the cooker!” He was all lit up like a television preacher I mean it was hard to doubt the sincerity blasting out of those white devil blue eyes.
Burroughs was to remain on the methadone maintenance program from 1980 until the end of his life in 1997. This meant that all of the books written in the States were created while opiated. Virtually all of Burroughs’s writing was done when he was high on something: The Naked Lunch was written on marijuana and majoun, and much of it was done when he was strung out on Eukodol, despite his many denials. The American books are all heroin and methadone novels. One effect of methadone is to radically suppress the sexual drive: Burroughs wrote a lot about sex in the final trilogy, but experienced it hardly at all. In addition, from the time of his return to the States he was stoned on pot most of the time. He always smoked in order to write. He woke several times in the night and would smoke a joint to get back to sleep. He also smoked full-strength English cigarettes, Senior Service when he could get them, until 1991 when he had a triple heart bypass. Drinking began at 6:00 p.m. He lived to be eighty-three years old.
3. “We Must Hold the Bunker at All Costs”9
Burroughs had no long-term relationship during the time he was in New York. He had hoped that James would be his partner, and though they no longer had a sexual re
lationship, he missed James and was always excited when he announced a forthcoming visit to New York. In the absence of a boyfriend, Bill had established a little family for himself at the Bunker with Stew Meyer, Howard Brookner, Victor Bockris, and John Giorno at the core, and a changing cast of walk-ons and spear carriers. James, however, remained central even though he was now only a visitor. Stewart Meyer, in his journal for January 27, 1981, commented, “James in a great mood and seems entirely at-home in the Bunker. His presence constitutes a household for William. The connection between them is probably the most important human contact in the ol’Doc’s life.”
John Giorno played the same role in Burroughs’s life that Antony Balch had done; he lived in the same building and could be relied upon to have dinner with, for friendship, and for occasional sex. With James in Kansas, Bill needed someone to look after him. James Grauerholz said, “[At this time] John was the person who contributed most to William’s care and upkeep and companionship, and loved him.” Some people complained that John Giorno befriended Burroughs in self-interest; he toured the country with him as his opening act, released him on his Giorno Poetry System records, and basked in his reflected glory. When he released his The Best of William Burroughs boxed set of CDs, Giorno included seven photographs of himself with Burroughs in the booklet but only four of Bill with Allen Ginsberg. Allen felt that John was exploiting Burroughs and capitalizing on his fame, but Burroughs knew that and chose to allow it.
