Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  In his usual way, Burroughs experimented with every possible combination: several cans at a time, two surfaces placed so that the blast paints two at once, aiming across the painting at different angles to create different exposures to different colors, and arranging the targets at different angles to produce different drip rates, more than one shot. Then all of a sudden, he found that he was just not getting it. The paintings were no longer working. “You just can’t use the same technique endlessly. It becomes mechanical, and the life just isn’t there anymore.” He needed to move on and try out new techniques, but his attention was already focused on his new book. Painting went on the back burner for a while.

  In 1982, the Nova Convention was echoed with a similar event in London called the Final Academy, a reference to the column Burroughs once had in London’s Mayfair magazine. David Dawson, Roger Ely, and Genesis P-Orridge organized four days of events at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton from September 29 to October 2 featuring Burroughs, Brion Gysin, John Giorno, and Genesis P-Orridge, Psychic Television, 23 Skidoo, Last Few Days, and Cabaret Voltaire. Jeff Nuttall was scheduled to appear but he flew in from Manchester and was piqued that no one was at the airport to meet him so he took the next flight back. The events were backed up by an exhibition of Burroughs’s first editions, cut-up manuscripts, and collage photographs at Dawson’s B2 Gallery in the East End, where people gathered each day. The Final Academy was followed by a concert at the Hacienda in Manchester on October 4 by Burroughs and Giorno and at the Centre Hotel, Liverpool, on October 5. There was a one-off at Richard Branson’s Heaven under the Charing Cross railway arches on October 7 featuring Burroughs, John Giorno, Marc Almond, and Heathcote Williams plus Derek Jarman, Psychic Television, Last Few Days, Cerith Wyn Evans with Marc Almond, and Brion Gysin, who had assembled a band that included Tessa from the Slits on cello, the drummer from Rip Rig and Panic, the percussionist Giles from Penguin Café Orchestra, and Ramuntcho Matta (son of the Chilean surrealist painter) on guitar. Brion read some works and sang others. Though there were some complaints that the events were too literary, and other people could see no connection between the musicians and Burroughs, overall it went down very well and served more or less the same purpose as the Nova Convention, establishing Burroughs as a mentor for the younger generation.

  On February 27, 1983, Burroughs’s brother Mort died at the age of seventy-three, and Bill and James flew to St. Louis for the funeral. Mort was survived by his wife, “Miggie,” Margaret Carr Vieths, who was one month older than Mort, and their twin daughters, Dorcas Carr and Laura Lee Burroughs, born May 5, 1937. There were just twelve people present, including Jay Rice, whose family owned a big department store in St. Louis and had attended Los Alamos with Bill and Mort. They all recited the Lord’s Prayer. Bill and James didn’t stay for the burial, as they had a plane to catch. Mort had been unable to find work as an architect during the Depression so went to work as a drafting engineer for General Electric and stayed there until he retired. Bill had not seen much of his brother, even though they were living relatively close to each other for the first time since they were children. “He was a pretty square, regular sort of a guy, so we didn’t have all that much in common. He couldn’t read my books.”31 In all the years he lived in St. Louis, Mort saw almost no one. “He just didn’t seem to have any interest in seeing people or have any reason to see people.” He collected seashells, and had some beautiful examples, and continued his father’s hobby and carved things out of wood, including walking canes. He and Bill shared an interest in guns and Mort owned a .41 Colt Peacemaker and a .22 rifle, both of which finished up in Bill’s possession, given to him by the family.

  Burroughs had last visited them in the summer of 1982 when he was in St. Louis filming with Howard Brookner, and Mort appeared, rather reluctantly, in the film. Mort had had a pacemaker for some years, but his death came as a shock to Bill. It turned out that Mort had been very sick for the previous six months but none of the treatments had worked. Bill never got on with Miggie, but after Mort died Bill wrote her a letter, “a very nice letter saying that I should tell her that I believed in life after death, and all that kind of thing—which is true. Some people make it, and some don’t. That’s the point in this world: some make it, and some don’t—when you die, your troubles is just beginning. So you gotta swim through the Duad, which is this huge river of excrement—it isn’t everybody that makes it through the Duad. Well, anyway, I wrote her a letter but I haven’t heard from her.”32

  His brother’s death set him thinking along the lines of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Certainly its last line rang true: “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” He remembered he and Mort playing together as children, their daily visits to Forest Park, Nursy, their time together at Los Alamos and at Harvard; a shared prewar world long gone. Two days before Mort died there had been another death, that of Tennessee Williams at age seventy-one. Although Williams had grown up in St. Louis, he and Burroughs had never been close, but they knew each other. Burroughs bought a copy of Williams’s 1975 Memoirs and added marginalia as he read it, as was his habit. He had, by this time, agreed to let the French biographer Ted Morgan write his life, so the subjects of biography and autobiography occupied his thoughts. He began to fill folders with reminiscences and scattered observations from his past as well as the usual dream notes and diary entries similar to that found in My Education and Last Words. He labeled these folders “Memoires” [sic], “Miscellaneous Memoire Materials,” and “Some memories/Unclarified drafts.” He began marginal annotations in a copy of April Ashley’s Odyssey, the harrowing, and sometimes hilarious, 1982 story of how George Jamieson, a Liverpool schoolboy, became the internationally famous transsexual April Ashley. Bill had known her slightly in London and they shared many acquaintances from the Rushmore Hotel days onward. Bill did the same with High Diver, the autobiography of his friend Michael Wishart, and with Paul Bowles’s memoir Without Stopping. Burroughs had quipped that it should have been called Without Telling, as it revealed so little. Tennessee Williams’s memoirs impressed him the most; he liked that Williams made no attempt to impose chronological order upon events. Bill did the same himself, allowing his mind to explore his past, sometimes encountering great Proustian gusts of memory, other times remarking that he remembered little about the person in question. He referred to these marked-up books as he wrote his own memoir, dating the pages and filing them. In July 1983, Ted Morgan arrived in Lawrence to conduct the first series of taped interviews for his groundbreaking biography, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, his questions provoking even more memories.

  In March, shortly after Mort’s death, James received a blow when his father was sent to prison for misappropriation of funds. A deputy prosecutor, whom James’s father had once tried to get disbarred, mounted theft charges against him. He was initially jailed for eleven days, then the court gave him two to six years in Lansing prison for stealing $30,000 from two estates that he was administering. He claimed he just borrowed the money, and it was in any case already paid back by James when he liquidated his father’s holdings in 1980.

  Chapter Fifty

  Who was Brion Gysin? The only authentic heir to Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain? Certainly that. Through his painting I caught glimpses of the Garden that the Old Man showed to his Assassins. The Garden cannot be faked. And Brion was incapable of fakery. He was Master of the Djoun forces, the Little People, who will never serve a faker or a coward.1

  1. Learnard Avenue

  In 1983 Bill’s lease on the stone house came up and his landlord wanted to increase the rent to four hundred dollars a month, which Bill thought was exorbitant. They managed to raise enough money to make the down payment on a small $28,000 bungalow at 1927 Learnard in the Barker neighborhood of southeast Lawrence. In September Bill moved in. It was on an acre of wooded ground on a quiet street, ideal for cats. The house was built in 1929 from a Sears Roebuck kit,2 which,
like many others in the neighborhood, was shipped to Lawrence by railroad and came complete with everything needed to assemble it, including the nails. Shortly before Bill moved in, the white cat disappeared, so it was just Bill and Ruski who relocated. The other cats were taken on by Robert Sudlow when he moved into the Stone House.

  It was a single-story wooden house, painted white, set back from the road, partly hidden by a profusion of honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, redbud, white cedar, and hackberry trees. Shortly after moving in, Burroughs had the house painted brick red with a white trim. The porch in front opened directly into the living room, and a covered porch in back led off the kitchen. There were two bedrooms, separated by the bathroom, to the side of the living room. There was a large storm cellar and a separate garage. Bill worked from his bedroom at the back of the house overlooking the garden. The room was spartan: a small wooden desk housing his electric typewriter and a filing cabinet, a low bed with a blue cotton cover, a snub-nosed .22 under the pillow “in case of trouble.” The living room was a long thin oblong, painted a modest brown and cream and furnished simply with a secondhand sofa and a round table with three chairs next to the walk-in kitchen. A large blue-and-green Gysin oil hung near the kitchen, and one of his Sahara scenes on another wall. The bookcase was filled with natural history books and hospital thrillers. The acre behind the house contained a garden with squash, beans, gooseberry bushes, and blackberry brambles as well as elm and silver maple, black walnut, and catalpa trees. Bill split the produce with his gardener. He patrolled the land with a long, pink-handled electric cattle prod. Squirrels lived in the trees next to the house by the small creek, the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Tributary, that defined the property line of that side of his land. (In May 2004 the 2.6-mile tributary of the Kansas River was renamed Burroughs Creek in his honor and now features as part of a scenic footpath walk through this part of Lawrence.) Burroughs was to live in this house for fifteen years, the longest he lived anywhere. He wrote seven books there and produced over two thousand artworks. He finally had a home.

  As he was now living within the Lawrence city limits, Burroughs was no longer permitted to shoot his guns. He kept them in the deep bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in the William Burroughs Communications office where James worked in the front bedroom, then made a more secure home for them in a locked safe in the cellar. His collection kept changing, but he normally had seven or eight handguns, two or three shotguns, and three or four rifles. “I’m not really a collector. I like guns that shoot and knives that cut. I have a couple of flintlock pistols that work, they work very well. It’s a lot of trouble getting them all ready, but it’s fun to shoot them. They are plenty accurate.”3 About once a week, depending on the weather, he went out to his new friend Fred Aldrich’s place about fifteen miles outside Lawrence to shoot. Fred’s place was an eighty-by-forty-foot steel and concrete warehouse filled with imported Chinese antiques, fenced with high wire mesh around the yard to keep out intruders. Fred was in his midthirties, with ginger hair and a freckled complexion. It was a bachelor establishment. In addition to the stock of his import business, the warehouse contained a 1972 Buick, a 75 mph speedboat, a 650cc Honda motorcycle, and in the carpeted living area, above the bed, a row of loaded shotguns. Fred had a backstop made from old lumber, where they pinned their targets. Bill was a pretty good shot, though Fred’s .44 Magnum made him stagger backward a bit for balance. Guns quickly became Burroughs’s leitmotif: he was never one for small talk and visitors quickly realized that this was a subject that would provoke an interesting and lively discussion. Rather like Charles Bukowski’s ever-present bottle of beer, any interview with Burroughs always mentioned the subject of weapons. In some ways it was a carapace—Burroughs had a deep and genuine interest in firearms—but he sometimes used it as a disguise, the return of el hombre invisible.

  Life in Kansas was in strong contrast to New York City. Though James had many old friends in town, they were all considerably younger than Bill, almost all of them were straight, and most had little interest in drugs, except the occasional joint. It took a while for Bill to establish his own friendships with them, and when he lived in the Stone House out of town he was quite lonely. He had to remake himself in order to fit in; he concentrated on his interest in guns and weapons, snakes and dangerous wild animals, painting and cats. The cats alleviated some of the loneliness. Sometimes friends like Debbie Harry and Chris Stein would visit from New York, but it was an expensive and time-consuming visit to make and even Allen Ginsberg didn’t come out that often. The situation continued in Learnard Avenue, and though much of his shopping and cleaning was taken care of, for the first six months he would walk to Dillon’s supermarket and buy frozen TV dinners to microwave and eat alone. Sometimes he would not see James for two or three days; it was a far cry from drinks and dinner every night at the Bunker with John Giorno, Howard, Stew, and Victor. He had dinner guests some nights, but with no one to eat and drink with on a regular basis he drank too much and concentrated on his cats. They became a lifelong obsession.

  Then things began to settle down, a routine was established with regular cleaners and a roster of volunteers to cook Bill’s evening meals. Burroughs never ate lunch, just a cracker and a glass of milk. Sometimes they would all go out to dine, usually accompanied by friends, but the downside of living in Lawrence was that there were no good restaurants. The only halfway decent one was at the Holiday Inn. For all the years he lived in Tangier, Paris, and London, Bill was used to fine dining. Things changed when he got to New York and lived in a neighborhood where there were few good restaurants—except for Phebe’s, virtually across the street from him on the Bowery, where he ate a lot—and as a consequence he changed his habits and began to eat at home. Finances also had something to do with it. He was a great deal poorer in New York, having become a junkie again. In Lawrence, whenever funds permitted it, he would send away for tins of caviar, which he loved, one of his few real luxuries.

  The house began to take on character. On the dining room wall was a painting of a naked youth dying of a snakebite, made by Dean Ripa, a snake hunter who traveled the world collecting dangerous snakes for zoos. When Burroughs was still at the Stone House, Ripa had written to him out of the blue offering to send him a gaboon viper. “In fact, I told him if I didn’t hear from him I was gonna send him the gaboon viper. That’s a very venomous snake from Africa. So he responded quickly ’cause he did not want to receive the gaboon viper.” Burroughs loved snakes and invited Ripa to visit. He arrived with a pillowcase of diamondback rattlesnakes, gaboon vipers, and kraits. Later he brought bigger examples. David Ohle described a visit to Learnard Avenue when Ripa brought a carload of serpents and dumped them on the floor, letting them crawl around. He put a gaboon—stiff from the cold car ride—and a thirteen-foot king cobra on Bill’s cat-shredded sofa, and warned Bill to be prepared to run. Ripa worked the others, which included the fer-de-lance (South America’s most deadly snake), with his stick. Bill stood near the bedroom door, ecstatic. Ripa’s business partner had died of a green mamba bite the previous year in Africa. From then on until Bill’s death, Ripa would arrive in Lawrence to look for copperheads and rattlers, spend a few days staying with Bill, then take off again for Africa or South America. In The Western Lands Burroughs wrote, “I number among my friends a young man named Dean Ripa, who could have stepped from the pages of a Joseph Conrad novel.”4

  One time Ripa had been out collecting and left a box of copperheads and rattlers on Bill’s back porch. He dropped a mouse in for them to eat and went out again. “When I came back [Bill] had put his hand into the cage, either to grab the mouse and move it over where the snake could get it or to take the mouse out, I don’t know which. The snake struck and just missed him by a hair. It might have actually brushed his hand. At his age, that would have been very bad. So he was nearly killed on one of my trips by rattlesnakes.”5 Bill told David Ohle he had also been bitten by a blacksnake. “When Dean was here I reached into a bag and it c
homped down on my hand. Dean had to remove it by relaxing its jaws […] because it has incurving teeth.”6 Naturally, when Burroughs wanted details of centipede venom, he turned to Dean Ripa for the answer. His exhaustive three-page letter is reproduced in The Western Lands.7

  Burroughs had never intended his books to be difficult to read. He would have loved to have a bestseller, and from Junky onward had always hoped that his books would be popular. In 1983 he read his way through all of John Le Carré—“quite fun”—and a number of other spy books before moving on to something less literary. “I read doctor books, you know, these doctors who are writing books now, and some of them are pretty good, pretty funny. I find that Benway is even outdone in practice. What goes on in hospitals, my God!”8 These were newsstand novels, including The Making of a Surgeon by William Nolen, MD, and Calling Doctor Horowitz by Steven Horowitz, MD.