Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Lawrence defies Kansas stereotypes. Unlike most of the state it is not flat but is surrounded by gently rolling hills, woods, and lakes. Old West Lawrence is built on the usual Jeffersonian grid, and there is a small downtown consisting of three or four blocks ending at the river. Old East Lawrence still has wood-frame buildings dating back to the 1860s, northern European–style houses with added porches and eaves to accommodate the midwestern weather of hot summers and heavy rainfall. The university is a welcome break in the grid, allowing the topography of the town to assert itself. Half the vehicles on the streets are pickups and everyone drives real slow. Across the river from downtown, next to the railroad tracks, a huge grain elevator dominates the skyline, a reminder of the town’s agricultural origins, and throughout the night, the sound of distant train whistles can be heard as the long freight trains pull slowly past the bridges over the Kansas River. There are plenty of fast-food outlets but no good restaurants.

  Burroughs wanted a place where he could shoot, so he had to be outside the city limits. In December 1981, he rented an old two-story stone house five miles out of town. It had a huge barn that was ideal for target shooting, there was plenty of land, a fish pond, and a great view from the top of a small hill. The house had a modern bathroom, propane heat, and air-conditioning. Money was tight. There was not enough for Bill to buy a car, so living there was a bit inconvenient, but people brought out food and he stocked up at the supermarket. Most days James drove out there in his yellow VW Rabbit hatchback. It was a very cold winter and the propane gas used for heating cost $180–$200 during those months.

  In order to move to Kansas, Burroughs took a gradual reduction cure to wean him off methadone. It was done slowly, over two or three months, so the addict hardly feels it. He was then on 40 milligrams a day, not a large dose, so it was not difficult for him. He was taking it in a glass of orange juice. At the end, “They let you drink orange juice for three days before they tell you you’re off. You don’t even know it.”7 Once he was in Kansas, however, it did not take long before he was back on drugs and enrolled with the methadone program in Kansas City. Early every Thursday morning James drove him there in his Isuzu Trooper to collect a week’s supply. Instead of talking, which Bill didn’t want to do anyway, as they drove they would play tapes of old songs made for Bill by Hank O’Neal. All Bill’s old favorites were there, like “Angry, please don’t be angry, because I was only teasing you.” When it came to “Strange Fruit,” he would usually say, “Skip it,” even though he liked it. James remembered, “We would put this music on and it would be magical, going through the cold mists, the sunrise.”8 Afterward they would have breakfast at Nichols Lunch before returning to Lawrence.

  Bill dropped into a ready-made social scene. James had been to college in Lawrence and many of his friends from that time still lived there: David Ohle, Susan Brosseau, Wayne Propst, and Bill Rich. Bill already knew David Ohle, because he had been their host when Bill and James visited the University of Texas at Austin for a reading in the late seventies, and had also met Patricia Marvin there. Artist Wayne Propst was an old friend of James’s, who took Burroughs out to visit Propst’s comfortable farmhouse when Bill was first thinking of getting a place in Lawrence. Bill and Wayne walked over Propst’s property, just the two of them. Bill said, “I’ll bet you five dollars I can hit that stalk over there,” pointing at a small, dried ragweed stalk about twenty feet away.

  “I’m in,” said Propst.

  Bill drew his pistol, spent some time focusing, then fired. The stalk fell in two parts.

  Bill turned to Propst, smiled, and made the international “pay up” sign with his fingers.

  Propst was taken aback a little that such a famous writer would expect him to pay up. “Oh yeah,” he said, and handed over the five dollars.9

  They became great friends, and Burroughs often visited. Propst is regarded as one of the most innovative, original, and amusing artists in the area. He was originally inspired by the Happenings art of the early sixties, one of his memorable works being “Vegetable Concert” from 1969, when he and his troupe broke vegetables and chewed them into microphones, accompanied by a collection of AM radios all tuned to different stations. Another work was a collection of five hundred shoes in a cage. Bill loved Wayne’s off-the-wall sense of humor and his honesty. He also admired his practicality; he was a plumber among other things and could fix most things in his huge workshop.

  Burroughs met Bill Rich during his preliminary reconnoiter of Lawrence in the summer of 1981. Rich had been a major force in the punk and post-punk scene in Lawrence, managing, producing, and playing with local bands and promoting concerts at the Outhouse, a barnlike structure beyond the city limits, near where Burroughs later sometimes shot guns. Through his record label Fresh Sounds, Bill Rich produced a five-volume series of CDs of local bands, Fresh Sounds from Middle America. He edited and published the music magazine Talk Talk, the autumn 1981 issue of which contained interviews with Psychedelic Furs, Iggy Pop, Billy Idol, and William Burroughs as well as record reviews and local news. The same issue contained a flexi-disc of Burroughs reading, produced by James Grauerholz. When Burroughs moved to Lawrence five months later Rich became one of Bill’s assistants, driving him around and cooking his meals. They became friends, sharing a mutual love of Denton Welch.

  Come the spring Bill could sit out on his back porch and smoke a joint. He sometimes caught a glimpse of a gray cat and began to put out food, but he could never get close to it. Once, walking back to the house after a shooting session in the barn with his friend Bill Rich, he saw the cat jump down from the porch: “He was about six months old, a gray-blue cat with green eyes—Ruski.” One April evening, just before dark, Bill stepped out onto his back porch and there was the gray cat, and with him a large white cat he had not seen before. The white cat was friendly, purring and rolling at Bill’s feet. It became a terrible nuisance, sitting on top of the TV, pawing at Bill’s typewriter, sitting in the sink, on the food counter. One day Ruski came in and jumped onto Bill’s lap, “nuzzling and purring and putting his little paws up to my face, telling me he wanted to be my cat.”10 At first Bill called him Smoky; he did not yet know he was a Russian blue. Bill kept a cat journal, which he later turned into The Cat Inside. He knew it was a dangerous subject. “In the cat book I’m treading that very thin line between the mawkish and the sublime. I don’t think it’s mawkish.”11 Bill became a confirmed cat lover. “I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren’t cute at all, and if they are cute they very rapidly outgrow it.”12 His cat became part of him, like a couple. “An old man in a rented house with his cat, Ruski. […] So he writes about desperately for an escape route.”13

  Throughout the winter of 1981–82, Burroughs had worked on the manuscript of The Place of Dead Roads, which was now nearing completion. It contained a lot of gay sex, perhaps as a form of sublimation as he lacked a partner, but it was usually integral to the story. He told Victor Bockris, “I say this: any writer who hasn’t jacked off with his characters, those characters will not come alive in a sexual context. I certainly jack off with my characters. I can write sexual situations, very hot sexual situations. I don’t get a hard-on, you understand.”14 The sex was less stylized than in The Wild Boys or other earlier books, where it served a different function and often consisted of mechanical repetition. According to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs’s use of sex was to explore his own sexual position, “rehearsing it over and over again, to sort of take it outside of himself, exteriorize it on the page and repeat it over and over again in different forms until his obsessive neurotic images lose their magnetic, hypnotic attraction or their conditioned attraction and become common-place visions in the day.”15

  William Burroughs Communications had a cash flow problem. The second part of their book advance of $8,000 was not forthcoming until they handed in the completed book. In April they telephoned Stewart Meyer, who had a day job as a typesetter, and asked if he would come out to Kansas for
a month and type The Place of Dead Roads and a book of Bill’s essays onto a computer disk for editing in exchange for three months’ free rent on the Bunker, where Stew was then living. Stew and his wife, Jenny Moradfar, could stay with James and his boyfriend, Ira Silverberg, who had joined James in Lawrence in January 1982. Meyer wrote, “Springtime in Kansas with Bill, shooting guns and gassing. I’m a lightning typist so the work’s not intimidating and I love to work on Bill’s pages so fine.”16 They arrived in Lawrence on May 8 and settled into James and Ira’s apartment on Washington near the KU campus. Stew noted, “Ira is the first of James’ sidekicks that Bill has accepted to the point of inclusion in his extended household.”17

  The final draft took longer to prepare than expected because again there were two distinct versions. Bill’s editor, Dick Seaver, at Holt kept pushing for a draft and was sent a version known as draft five. But James kept working on it and made a reassembly of the whole thing based on Bill’s raw material. He came up with draft six. On December 6, Richard Seaver went to Kansas to discuss the editing of the book with Bill and James Grauerholz. James explained, “Dick thought that draft five was such beautiful poetry and so perfect, [but then] I brought in draft six which is the structure that’s published, and there was a lot of arguing about it. I remember Dick Seaver’s comment was that draft six is more commercial, draft five is more poetic. […] We went through every one of the chapters, page by page, saying ‘in or out?’ ” Burroughs was very attached to draft five and often mentioned that he would like to see a limited edition of it published. Burroughs explained the book to Chris Bohn:

  The Place of Dead Roads is a sequel to Cities of the Red Night. What happened there was, like, commandoes were parachuted behind enemy lines in time and they sort of cleaned up and drastically altered South and Central America. Dead Roads is the same thing applied to North America. They did South and Central America and the Catholic Church, now they’re doing North America and the protestant ethic and the Bible Belt. […] There’s drastically fewer sexual scenes in Dead Roads than Cities of the Dead Night. There’s really not that many at all. It’s really concerned with weaponry more than anything else. Weaponry on all levels. The whole theory of weaponry and war. The history of this planet is the history of war, the only thing that gets a homo sapien up off his dead ass is a foot up! And that foot is war!18

  The strongest influence on Burroughs’s work in this book is Denton Welch, whom Burroughs used as the model for Kim Carsons. Burroughs dedicated the book “To Denton Welch, For Kim Carsons.”19 He told a journalist, “Denton Welsh is Kim Carsons.”20 Burroughs was pleased with The Place of Dead Roads. To him it met his own strict criteria: “I sit down and write. If I can’t do something else. I just start out and it takes shape. If I can answer [Matthew] Arnold’s three questions—What is the writer trying to do? How well does he succeed in doing it? Is it worth doing?—then I feel I’ve succeeded. To those questions for Dead Roads I was able to answer fully, with an unequivocal ‘yes’ for the last.”21

  The book is a murder mystery, but when James Grauerholz read the manuscript in the first draft he easily picked out the killer, saying it was quite clear who it was and why. Burroughs himself had not yet realized who it was. “I’d really written clearer than I realized. I couldn’t tell myself who had done it, but when James told me it could only have been one person, and when I looked back over it, he was right.”22 Bill made sure that the answer was a bit less obvious.

  2. Painting with Guns

  Burroughs began painting by accident in February 1982. He had a new double-barrel Rossi twelve-gauge shotgun and was trying it out, using a sheet of plywood as a target and number 6 shot. When he looked at the target there were some very interesting striations in the wood, where the shot had stripped away the layers—much as Gysin’s original Stanley knife had sliced through layers of newsprint. “I saw all sorts of things—little villages, streets of all kinds. I said, ‘My God, this is a work of art.’ ” The gun had heavy recoil and it really jarred him to shoot it, so he called the piece Sore Shoulder.23 It became his first shotgun piece. “I then began preparing the wood with calligraphy before I shot into it.”24 All through March Bill blasted away at prepared surfaces with double-zero shot. He quickly realized the potential of shooting at paint cans, and began positioning containers of paint against the wood and shooting them, causing explosions of color all across the surface. He began to add collage elements such as photographs and pictures torn from magazines just as he did in his scrapbooks. At the time he never expected to sell any of them, in fact he didn’t regard it as anything serious. Then Tim Leary came to town touring with G. Gordon Liddy. After their lecture there was a reception at the Stone House and Tim became the first person to buy one of Bill’s paintings, paying him $10,000.

  As was often the case in the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp did it first. In his Large Glass (1915–23) there is an area known as “The Nine Shots” made by a little child’s cannon that shoots matches. A match, with a little bit of colored paint on its tip, was aimed toward a target from three different positions, with three shots from each position. With each impact, the match left a touch of paint at the point of impact, and at these nine points a hole was drilled in the glass. A good shot might have hit the target each time, resulting in only one hole being drilled, but as Duchamp said, “the worse the instrument, the better you measure the skill.” Duchamp was a bad shot.25

  Other artists had used guns. In 1943, Joseph Cornell made a small work featuring a gunshot hole called Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery. Beginning in 1961, Niki de Saint Phalle made her “Tir” series of paintings, filling polyethylene bags with different-colored paint and attaching them to a blockboard, then covering the front with a thin layer of white plaster, so that the paint bags were no longer visible. Spectators were then invited to shoot at the blank painting with a .22 rifle. Among those assisting her in her art were Robert Rauschenberg—who later worked with Burroughs—and Jasper Johns. For her the moment of action and the emphasis on chance was as important as the finished work. She stopped making the works in 1963, explaining, “I had become addicted to shooting, like one becomes addicted to a drug.”26

  Burroughs had been engaged in making visual art ever since he did a series of about a hundred glyph watercolors in 1959, a sheet of which was used to make the dust jacket of The Naked Lunch. When he began working with grids on his cut-ups he very quickly introduced visual elements to the manuscripts: sections outlined in red and green, words replaced with colored dots, grids drawn in bright red or blue lines. When he wrote in his scrapbooks he often used different-colored inks and purposely varied the size of his writing for aesthetic reasons. The news clippings and press photographs stuck into the scrapbooks were often treated with colored washes. One of the scrapbooks was so intensely colored that it has become known as The Book of Hours. When his work was published in magazines, he often went back through his photo files to find the illustrations and photographs that helped to inspire the piece in question and stuck them onto the open pages of the periodical. He assembled huge files of photographs and images, cross-filed ready for use. In 1965, when he was living in New York, Ed Sanders was putting together an issue of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts,27 and needed an image of a motorcycle racer for his decorations to the cover. He and fellow member of the Fugs, Ken Weaver, went over to see Burroughs, who fished around in his files and produced the perfect image.

  Burroughs had all along taken photographs. During his time in Tangier, he photographed his friends and visitors, but his main interest was in street scenes, the “sets” for his writing. He took hundreds of pictures of Tangier and of Gibraltar, particularly structures like the lighting towers at the football grounds, which later appeared in Towers Open Fire. His occult studies with Gysin in Paris led him to neglect photography, but he took it up again in London and from 1960 onward took endless pictures of buildings, streets, and park scenes. In Tangier in 1963 he began his photo collages—arrangement
s of objects photographed, rearranged, and photographed again—so he had an extensive background of visual art-making when he accidentally made his first piece of shotgun art. Initially he treated painting as an interesting supplement to shooting, and it was not until 1986 that he exhibited his work publicly—at the University of Kansas library in Lawrence—and not until December 1987 that he had his first show.

  During the shooting stage of Burroughs’s art, the works were rather large, often made using old doors that he shot at, adding collage elements to the exploded paint. The writing and the painting overlapped—he was still working on The Place of Dead Roads—and frequently the paintings were related in some way to the writing. “In painting I see with my hands and I do not know what my hands have done until I look at it afterwards. It is when I look at a completed canvas that I know what the painting is about. Very often they turn out to be illustrative of my writing, or what I am thinking about writing.”28 The unpredictable quality of this type of painting appealed to Burroughs because of its parallels with the cut-ups: part of the creation was random, followed by controlled selection, repainting, or the addition of collage elements. “The shotgun blast releases the little spirits compacted in the layers of wood, causing the colors of the paints to splash out in unforeseeable, unpredictable images and patterns.”29 He found that pistol cartridges did not reliably explode but just made a hole in the can so that the paint ran out rather than exploding sideways. He found that a high-velocity cartridge usually did the job. Sometimes the can would be thrown one hundred feet or more by some of his early shotgun paintings. He collaborated with Wayne Propst to invent a cannon to shoot bowling balls to make a really big impact on Bill’s plywood panels. Wayne remembers, “At first, we shot it at Burroughs’s ‘failed’ art, then at figures cut from plywood. If I remember, some of the bowling ball pieces were sent to a gallery but didn’t sell. It was an extremely dangerous contraption—we didn’t use it for long.”30