by Barry Miles
John Giorno and James had very different approaches to Burroughs. For Giorno, Burroughs was like a guru and could do no wrong, even if he was on tour and almost too inebriated to read his work. James remembered, “I would say, ‘William’s too drunk,’ and John would say, ‘Oh, but he’s a great wisdom teacher.’ And he was not the only one; there were other people like Steven Lowe. Their worshipful stance was such that he could do no wrong.” James had a more practical approach. “My point of view was, I admire him, I give him the benefit of the doubt, but he’s only human, he has his limitations, he may not be respecting them. I felt like his wife, like, ‘Don’t embarrass me.’ I was embarrassed for him. He dreaded the readings, at first, then he got into it. The difference with me was that I was just square enough to think, ‘No, he’s drinking too much, not eating enough and he’s ill.’ Some of the readings were a disaster. More than he realized. But he did many great ones.”
John, on the other hand, wrote, “He’d get drunk (vodka and Coca-Cola) and stoned (marijuana) before every performance and then walk out onstage cold grey and focused and give a magnificent performance. Each show was a masterpiece, exhilarating audiences with his clarity.”10 James agreed with Ginsberg that John was a “glamour seeker. […] John Giorno could not ever possibly object to, or be embarrassed by, or deny absolutely capitalizing on William’s fame or anybody else’s fame that he’s ever known in his life to gather more fame and attention for himself. That is an overall Identikit picture of John Giorno. It’s his nature.” But it was usually a positive experience. James recalled, “John contributed a huge amount to William’s performances and those shows. Not only was he a great opener but he was a great travel companion and loads of fun to drink with. A lot of fun and laughs. And he had a real professional attitude towards getting there and setting up. […] I really must say, we really had the most wonderful times.”
Allen was one of Bill’s frequent visitors. Their long friendship had matured to a stage where they would bicker for hours on end like an old married couple. They had deep reserves of love and mutual respect for each other that a few disagreements could not harm. Bill was irritated that Allen was judgmental about his drug taking, alcoholism, and lack of interest in Buddhism. In turn, he thought it was a failing in Allen not to see the value of telepathy, the magical kingdom, and Bill’s other concerns. This sometimes led to a low level of antagonism, but they both seemed very comfortable with it; they were surface disagreements that they had held for years.
Allen’s best work was written in the fifties, his years in San Francisco, New York, and Paris, when he did nothing else but write poetry. In the sixties, much of his writing time was taken up by antiwar and other political activities. He provided many of the ideas and much of the philosophy behind the hippie movement and was a catalyst to the growth of the underground press with his enormous, ever-growing body of contacts. Burroughs was enormously impressed at how much Allen had achieved, but was concerned at how stressed, tired, and exhausted he often appeared. In his years of work at Naropa, teaching and working with assistants and administrators, Allen had neglected his poetry. He wrote a few good short poems, but literally had not the time to do more. Naropa took up thousands of hours of his time over the years.
His teaching had also made him into a teacher; Allen had developed a tendency to pronounce instead of converse. Old friends such as Lucien Carr grew increasingly irritated as Allen lectured them on the CIA, or Buddhism, or whatever his latest preoccupation was, instead of relating to them as friends. His office staff had heard enough of Trungpa’s supposed lineage to be bored at the mere mention of his name. His continuing obsession with sex also became irritating. One time at the Bunker Allen asked Bill how his sex life was going and Bill sighed, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “Oh Allen give it a rest.”11 Allen had felt that Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville had supplanted him in Bill’s affections, but now that Bill was back in New York, Allen was able to resume his senior role once again and Bill regarded him as his closest friend. Allen rarely got really high, but one evening that January he tried some Thai stick and got smashed silly. He kept asking Bill long, complicated questions and then forgetting the subject halfway through. Bill thought this was hilarious and kept asking, “What was the question again, Allen?”
In the mornings Bill would seat himself at his desk in his banker’s chair and set to work. Above him was one of Brion Gysin’s Moroccan street scenes, one of the few decorations in the vast empty white space. The concrete floor and ceiling amplified the buzzing from the refrigerator, the radiators gurgled and sometimes emitted a cough of steam, the room resounded with the machine-gun rattle as Burroughs pounded the keys of his large upright manual Olympia. Sometimes John Giorno or Stew Meyer would stop by in the afternoon, but Burroughs usually put in a good day’s work. He could no longer afford to eat out all the time, but there was rarely a need to because John Giorno cooked for him much of the time, or one of the family would organize a dinner party at the Bunker for five or six people. With the exception of the celebrities brought over by Victor Bockris to provide fodder for his book, Burroughs rarely saw anyone outside of his small circle of friends.
In addition to arranging readings for Bill and dealing with the endless requests for interviews, meetings, and reprint rights, much of James’s time was taken up with family problems. In January 1980 his father had a complete nervous breakdown and spent nine months in the psychiatric ward of the VA hospital in Topeka. James had to wrap up his father’s law business and pay off huge debts, including contested loans from two estates he managed. Meanwhile in January Burroughs attended the “Freud and the Unconscious” conference in Milan and the next month flew off to Brussels for a two-week European reading tour. April saw Bill and James in Los Angeles, visiting the set of John Byrum’s Heart Beat film about Kerouac and Cassady. They were treated very well, stayed at the Tropicana, had a car at their disposal and all the reefer they wanted. Afterward Bill went to spend two days with Steven Lowe in New Mexico, but it rained the whole time so he had no chance to do any shooting.
In May, Bill made a short trip to Paris, and in July he was a speaker at the three-day “D. H. Lawrence: His Influence on Living and Writing Today” conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Allen Ginsberg, Margaret Drabble, Robert Duncan, Stephen Spender, and others. In fact he got to say very little because Leslie Fiedler dominated the proceedings and no one else could get a word in edgewise. Burroughs remembered, “Finally it got so bad that I wanted to say something and Leslie Fiedler keeps talking on and on, and Allen Ginsberg said, ‘Will you shut up? William wants to say something!’ And I did. I pointed out that I had indeed been influenced very much by Lawrence’s book on Mexico, and what I had written about Mexico and various other remarks like that.”12 Spender had changed his attitude toward Burroughs since their altercation at the Edinburgh Literary Conference in 1962 and was “sweet as pie,” as Burroughs said. Afterward there was a big reception in Taos at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s adobe mansion. Burroughs stopped briefly in New York on his way to a reading in Rome. His last big trip that year was in December to the south of France, where he took part in a four-day conference called “Man, Earth and the Challenges” at the Institute of Ecotechnics, in Les Marronniers, Aix-en-Provence. In Paris he stayed with Howard Brookner and spent a lot of time with Brion. He was home in the Bunker for Christmas after an exhausting year.
There were six hundred pages of material left over from Cities of the Red Night, even after some of it was thrown away. A lot of it went into the next book, The Place of Dead Roads. Burroughs had a dream in which a Mexican was patiently trying to explain to a gringo, “These aren’t unused roads, they are dead roads.” The new book was a lot easier to write because it was straight narrative. The western material from Cities of the Red Night acted as a springboard. Denton Welch was another major influence that led to the character of Kim Carsons. Burroughs explained, “The whole style of the book, the whole style of his speech, is pure Denton Welch. I cou
ld pass off whole sections of that as an undiscovered manuscript by Denton Welch and everyone would say it’s true.”13 He went on: “The voice, to the extent that it’s Denton Welch, it isn’t a question of admiring it, it’s a question of it being suitable for a certain character.”14
Billy continued to hover in Bill’s consciousness as a nagging unsolved problem. At the end of 1980, Teina, an old girlfriend of Billy’s from the Green Valley School, wrote and invited Billy down to Florida from Denver. She was newly divorced, wealthy, and had harbored a crush on him ever since they were at school, but had no idea what a terrible state he was in. Burroughs wrote, “We thought maybe she would really look after him, and with her money it would work out. She was picturing him as the person she remembered, this healthy person, this totally different person. Before he was drinking. She must have gotten a terrible shock.”15 James did try to warn her, but no one could have expected such a deterioration in someone so young. It didn’t work out, but she did not abandon him; she put him up in one of the empty apartments that she owned. Meanwhile he had a big falling-out with George Van Hilsheimer, who ran the Green Valley School, over a small incident; Billy got completely drunk on malt liquor and passed out by a creek, where he was picked up by the police and finished up in West Volusia County Hospital in DeLand, Florida.
Over the years Billy Jr.’s health had deteriorated further. He was in pain much of the time. He and Bill frequently spoke on the phone and exchanged correspondence, but his decline seemed to be inexorable. There were a few occasions when Bill and Billy did readings together, but Billy Jr. had terrible stage fright. Allen gave him twenty-five dollars as a teaching fee for talking to a class at Naropa, though it almost certainly came from his own pocket. Billy once made good money doing a radio documentary on his father, but he was basically unemployable and when he did get a job he never held it for long. He drank a lot and was unpredictable, selfish, and difficult to be with. He was on Social Services but he was very negligent about going to collect his checks and going through the bureaucracy needed to get the money. As soon as he got money he would give it away or spend it. Bill sent him $150 a month, which was enough for him to live on. If he sent any more, Billy would only give it away; sometimes he gave everything away and had no money for food. Bill was uncritical; he had never been much good at holding down a job himself. It obviously wasn’t going to work out with Teina, so Bill paid for Billy to rent a room in DeLand. Ten days later Billy called one of the social workers at West Volusia County Hospital, saying, “You’d better get over here, I’m really sick.” The man went over, looked at him, and called an ambulance. Billy died six hours later on the morning of March 3, 1981. James received the telephone call at the Bunker and told Bill at breakfast. Bill rose and went to his room, where he sobbed uncontrollably for half an hour.16
The cause of death was given as a heart attack. There was an autopsy but Bill never learned of its results. Bill did not go to Florida. He attended a short ceremony at Trungpa’s center in New York, conducted by one of the Tibetans. Bill was happy that Billy had been given five additional years, though Billy himself may have preferred otherwise. He began dreaming about Billy. Allen salvaged Billy’s papers that were still in Boulder and forwarded them. Burroughs said, “He left these papers, obviously meant for me to see. There’s a curse delivered against me, which he never sent. This outpouring of hatred. But the essential thing is that he made me responsible for every thing that ever happened to him. […] On and on, it was quite insane. But it’s that thing that Billy had, of making someone else completely responsible for everything they do.”17
Karen, Billy’s former wife, was given his ashes, but she disliked Burroughs, whom she blamed for all Billy’s problems, and refused to send them on to him. Allen Ginsberg intervened. “She had nothing against me. So I sent a very simple letter saying I would take care of it. Bill had no specific intention with the ashes, so I suggested that we should just bury them there [Boulder]. So he said fine, so I said I’d take care of it.”18 She sent the ashes to him. Allen arranged a small ceremony at Naropa and then the ashes were buried on the back hill approach to Marpa Point, on land owned by Karmê Chöling outside Boulder.
Burroughs could never fully understand why Billy blamed him for everything. He recognized that he had been a terrible father and neglected his son. He had not shown him the love he so desperately wanted and had been unable to mend the relationship in Boulder during the only sustained time they spent together. But Burroughs refused to accept that by killing the boy’s mother he had destroyed Billy’s life. He did not understand why Billy felt that he was responsible for his distress, for the drinking and drug taking that eventually led to his death. Bill’s immediate reaction to Billy’s death was to start going over to Rivington Street himself to score for heroin, despite being on methadone. After a busy schedule of readings to promote Cities of the Red Night, Bill went to Lawrence in June to spend a month with James to sort out his feelings about Billy and recover. James wrote to Julie, Billy’s half sister, to inform her of his death, but received no reply.
Meanwhile, Burroughs’s profile was slowly increasing in the United States, the result of all the celebrity pieces written by Victor Bockris and others, and the ceaseless touring America from coast to coast to promote Cities of the Red Night with readings and book signings. The culmination of all this activity was an appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, the coolest television show on the air, home to writers such as Terry Southern and performers like John Belushi. The writers’ wing of the show was famously awash with hash and cocaine, and the show itself was peppered with drug-taking in-jokes. Burroughs appeared in a six-minute segment on November 7, 1981. He was introduced by actress and model Lauren Hutton, who said, “I’m very pleased tonight to introduce a man who in my opinion is the greatest living writer in America. Reading selections from Naked Lunch and Nova Express in his first television appearance ever, here is Mr. William Burroughs!”19 Saturday Night Live musical director Hal Willner added a subtle soundtrack of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to Burroughs’s reading from “Dr. Benway,” to great effect. There was no mention of the Beat Generation. His appearance on Saturday Night Live helped him to throw off this tag and appear as an absolutely unique voice in American letters.
BOOK NINE
Return to Roots
Chapter Forty-Nine
I would have to say yes, evil exists, definitely. […] I asked myself, why do these demons have such necessity to possess, and why are they so reluctant to leave? The answer is, that’s the only way they can get out of hell—it’s sort of like junk. They possess somebody and they want to hang on to it because that’s their ticket out of hell.1
1. Tornado Alley
On June 19, 1981, Burroughs was staying in a sublet apartment in the same building as James on Oread (pronounced “Oriad”) Avenue at the north end of the campus of the University of Kansas at Lawrence. At 7:30 in the evening Bill was standing on the balcony and saw the sky turn black. Then they heard the tornado warning. Golf ball–size hailstones began to fall, bouncing on the sidewalk, drumming on car roofs, and the temperature dropped by twenty degrees in five minutes. The sky turned green, “tornado green.” The twister carved its way through Lawrence, killing one man, injuring thirty-one, and causing $18 million worth of damage. Fifteen homes were damaged or demolished and many businesses. The tornado hit the Gaslight Village mobile home park, overturning trailers: “They always hit mobile homes. They just don’t like mobile homes,”2 commented Bill.
He was spending the summer in Lawrence hoping to complete The Place of Dead Roads, and also to see if he liked it well enough to move there. Bill had been intending to move out of New York City for some time. “I was sick of New York. It had no advantages for me. There was no reason for me to stay there.”3 He had finished his season there and the people who had once entertained him now seemed mundane. In addition he had hardly any money because he was spending so much on drugs. He was never one to go out to parties
and, though invited, had never set foot in Studio 54. The tipping point came when the landlord attempted to double the rent on the Bunker. He knew then that it was time to move. He wanted somewhere he could buy real estate and settle down. He had tried Boulder and decided that he didn’t like it at all. “I wanted to see if I would like to live there. No, I didn’t at all. I don’t like the cheesy mountains there, I don’t like mountains, and those aren’t even good mountains.”4 Lawrence, on the other hand, had the advantage of being cheap. James lived there among his old hippie friends, so there was a social scene already in place. It was also a return to the Midwest. In a sense, he had come full circle.
Lawrence is a small university town, then with about fifty thousand people, on the banks of the Kansas River, forty miles west of Kansas City. Previously, the best-known writers to live there were Langston Hughes—who hated it because he suffered the ills of segregation and prejudice there—and Frank Harris, who was in Lawrence from 1872 until 1875, not long after the town was founded. He was admitted to the American Bar there and described his amorous exploits in My Life and Loves, which was banned in both the United States and the UK for forty years for its explicit sexuality. Lawrence’s latest resident was equally controversial; lucky then that the town was a small island of liberalism in one of the most conservative and right-wing states in the Union. Not that the Lawrencians were all liberal; after his death, the various efforts to commemorate the fact that Burroughs had spent longer in Lawrence than anywhere else in his life were met with a substantial resistance. Choosing to relocate into a region that considered his ideas anathema was bound to cause problems. Though he regarded himself as being deeply spiritual, he said, “I detest Bible Belt Christianity—dead, suffocating under layers of ignorance, stupidity and barely hidden bigotry and vicious hate.”5 “Christianity is the most virulent spiritual poison ever administered to a disaster-prone planet. It is parasitic, fastens onto people, and the essence of evil is parasitism.”6 But Burroughs came to no harm in Lawrence, and soon enjoyed a supportive community of James’s old friends, young fans, and people from the university.
