by Barry Miles
For Drugstore Cowboy, Van Sant had originally wanted Burroughs to play the part of Bob Hughes, the slightly older junkie, leader of a gang of four drug addicts who roam the country in the early seventies, supporting their habit by robbing hospitals and pharmacies. In late 1988, Bill and James went to Portland, Oregon, and Bill did a reading for the part that went very well. Burroughs wasn’t sure that he could handle a lead role, and he and James came up with the idea of Bill developing another of the characters, Tom, into a junkie priest, based on Burroughs’s story “The Priest They Called Him.” Gus loved the idea and said he would rewrite the part. Unfortunately he was very busy with production issues and his new script didn’t really cut it. Van Sant said, “He didn’t want to play the character Tom the way he was originally written in the screenplay, which was as this sort of pathetic loser… he wanted the character to have some more pride. So he came up with the idea of making Tom be a junkie priest. So he pretty much created the stuff in his scenes on his own.”18 James asked if they could work on it and Gus agreed. James rewrote the four priest scenes and Bill then added his own imprimatur to them. James remains proud to be the author of the line, “Drugs have been systematically scapegoated and demonized in this country,” that Burroughs delivers with such emphasis. The studio was aghast and wanted to cut Bill out of the movie entirely. Gus Van Sant said, “We had to fight for him. That’s probably the biggest fight I’ve ever had, […] smaller companies can be just as fierce as their studio counterparts.”19 Matt Dillon took the lead role as Bob Hughes, and Bill played Tom, the priest, to great acclaim. Gus Van Sant was also the director of Burroughs’s most successful short, A Thanksgiving Prayer (1990), taken from Tornado Alley, in which he used montages over a film of Burroughs reading the text.
2. Last Boy
Burroughs had sex with no more than half a dozen people between 1974 and 1997, and he was never able to find someone to replace Ian. When he toured the country doing readings there were sometimes opportunities to pick up boys, and in San Francisco he did find a temporary partner. In New York he mostly had sex with Allen Ginsberg’s friends. Raymond Foye said, “William only wanted to be fucked, it was wham, whirr, thankyou sir—no kissing, no touching, he just lay down and used a popper, but afterwards he was all sentimental and gushy, like a 14-year-old girl.”20 Bill’s relationship with Cabell Hardy had never been very satisfactory, though it meant a lot to Cabell, who was very sensitive, despite his unfortunate personality. He wrote a good deal about his relationship with Burroughs, as did Mark Ewert, who described it in great detail, leaving nothing to the imagination.
In 1988, a teenager named Mark Ewert flew across country to the Naropa Institute with the specific purpose of having sex with Burroughs and Ginsberg. “By sleeping with them, I would join my life to theirs, thereby speeding up my own ascent into personal and artistic greatness. Burroughs wasn’t at Naropa that year, so I made my play for Allen, and that worked out great.”21 Allen told him, “It would be great to get Bill laid. He loves to get fucked. And you genuinely care about him and his work.”22 But it was not until September of 1989 that Ewert and Burroughs met. Bill was in town, staying at the Bunker, and Allen called Ewert to ask if he still wanted to meet Burroughs. Ewert said yes, so Allen arranged for him to be his date at the dinner party John Giorno was giving for Bill. There were a dozen guests, all male, all considerably older than him. Mark was seated next to Burroughs. The big hit of the dinner was a Freddy Krueger glove, brought along to show them by Chris Stein of Blondie. It was made from soft gray leather and each finger had a heavy curved blade attached. It had cost him $5,000. Everyone took turns wearing it and swishing it about. Bill said how impractical it was; nonetheless he hogged it, dancing around, demonstrating a series of feints and thrusts for Mark’s benefit. Everyone backed away, partly to give the two of them space, and partly for their own safety. Ewert wrote, “William spent what was for me an uncomfortably long time stalking me around the room, slashing me with the glove, and making ‘growr, growr’ noises. His gaze was steely fixed on mine, and for a moment I was honestly afraid that he would attack me for real if I flinched or looked away: ‘Don’t let him see your fear.’ William’s jungle-hunt of me seemed like such a bad metaphor for exactly what it was—a carnal pursuit—that I was embarrassed for the both of us, but on the other hand, I was totally thrilled. Wasn’t everything proceeding exactly like I had planned?”23
The next day at Allen’s, Mark eagerly awaited Bill’s verdict. When Allen telephoned him, James answered, and told Allen that Bill had said, “Boy, Allen’s got himself a real beauty this time, hasn’t he?” Allen, the old procurer, spoke to Bill and told Mark, “I made appointment for you, to go over there, at two. James and John and everyone will be gone by then, so you two should have the place to yourselves.” Mark was eighteen, Bill was seventy-five. Bill was awkward and was clearly a little scared. Mark wrote candidly about his seduction:
Lastly, William commits himself to the irrevocable act of actually putting his hand on my knee, and still I do not freak out—indeed, I in turn put my hand on his knee. I give it a little squeeze, and when I feel how bony and frail his leg is, underneath the stiff fabric of his jeans, I’m suddenly awash with a wave of tender protectiveness for this brave little guy, who’s gone through such an ordeal just for a simple sign of affection. Manfully, I throw my arm around his shoulder, and pull William towards me. Both of us sag with relief. William and I didn’t fuck, kiss, or blow one another, which was fine with me, and was certainly a nice change of pace from Allen. […] I couldn’t get over how similar our bodies were: both of us white, hairless, smooth—the same height, the same weight, the same build. The inescapable conclusion was that I was in bed with another boy, and the idea was unbelievably sexy. I had never been in bed with another boy before, and here was my perfect double: a lean, taut body that I could grip with a real hunger, which would be returned.24
Two weeks later, Mark received a postcard inviting him to spend the weekend with Bill in Lawrence. “I can offer you simple, country pleasures, shooting, fishing, canoeing.” He came to stay, and Bill’s support crew stayed well away, even postponing the lawn mowing. Bill later wrote in his journal, “Mark Ewert left yesterday after a three-day visit. I feel now very much merged together. His face emerged quite clearly in a painting I did the last day he was here. He is an extraordinarily sweet and beneficent presence.”25 Friends say that Bill was obsessed with him. The fact was, Bill enjoyed the attention, but he was a junkie and had little in the way of sex drive.
3. Opera
The success of his art career meant that Burroughs could cut down on his readings. Between 1974 and 1988 he had read all over the United States and Canada, he’d read in Amsterdam six times, as well as Berlin, Brussels, London, Helsinki, Basel, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Rome, and other major European cities. In the spring and fall of 1981 they toured Cities of the Red Night with Laurie Anderson and John Giorno. Laurie was brilliant and added a great deal to the show. In San Francisco they oversold the theater and had to add another show. Burroughs liked her a lot. Grauerholz says, “They had a natural kinship, he was very fond of Laurie.” Burroughs appeared in Home of the Brave (1986) and sang “Sharkey’s Night” in his shaky voice on her album Mister Heartbreak (1984). The longest tour had been of Scandinavia in 1983 at the age of sixty-nine. At the university in Tampere, Finland, he performed on a thrust stage to a standing audience. He read well and received tremendous applause. He gathered his papers, turned to his right to walk to the wings, but, blinded by the stage lights, he walked right off the lip of the stage, at least a five-foot rise. In a split second he realized what had happened and somehow managed to crouch and land on his feet like a cat. James grabbed him before his knees buckled.
As if a new career in painting were not enough, seventy-five-year-old Burroughs now got involved with an opera. Several years before, Howard Brookner had introduced Burroughs to Robert Wilson, and now in 1989, Wilson approached Burroughs to collaborate on an ope
ra called The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, based on the German folktale Der Freischütz (The Marksman),26 to be performed in Germany. It is the story of the devil’s bargain, which is always a fool’s bargain. It was perfect for Burroughs.
A file clerk is in love with a huntsman’s daughter, but to obtain her father’s permission to marry, the clerk has to prove his worth as a hunter, for the hunter was getting old and wanted to maintain his legacy. But the clerk is a lousy shot and only brings back a vulture. On his next trip to the forest the devil—Pegleg—appears to him and offers him a handful of magic bullets. With these bullets he hits anything he aims at, but the devil warns him that “some of these bullets are for thee and some are for me.” As his wedding approaches the clerk begins to get nervous, as there is to be a shooting contest and he needs more bullets. He goes to the crossroads and the devil gives him one more magic bullet. At the contest he aims at a wooden dove, but the bullet circles the assembled guests and strikes his betrothed and kills her. The clerk goes mad and joins the devil’s previous victims in the Devil’s Carnival.
Burroughs wrote the libretto, based on Thomas De Quincey’s version of the tale, initially using rhyming couplets even though he knew they would be lost when it was translated into German (this material was never used); singer Tom Waits wrote the songs, which remained in English; and Robert Wilson directed and stage designed the entire performance. The plot has an obvious parallel with Burroughs’s killing of Joan, and he was not shy to reference this in his lyrics for the song “George Schmid”: “Some bullets is special for a single aim. A certain stag, or a certain person. And no matter where you aim, that’s where the bullet will end up. And in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser’s wand, and points where the bullet wants to go.”27 Three of the songs used Burroughs’s lyrics, with music by Tom Waits, and Burroughs himself sang “T’Ain’t No Sin” for the CD version.
In September 1989, Tom Waits, Robert Wilson, and Wolfgang Wiens, dramaturge of the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, spent a week in Lawrence working daily in Bill’s front room with James acting as stenographer and secretary, blocking out The Black Rider. Naturally there were many changes as the words were adapted for performance, and faxes flew back and forth between the theater and Kansas all through the fall and winter of 1989–90 until Wilson was satisfied. Then in February 1990 the team reconvened in Hamburg, all staying at the same hotel with Udo Breger, who was translating Bill’s words into German. Bill’s libretto was then delivered to Wolfgang Wiens, who edited the text further in daily consultation with Wilson during the period of rehearsal and development. Bill attended rehearsals from 7:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m., while Udo and James worked on the translation of the texts. Wilson would invariably have something that he wanted Bill to change, a scene that would have to be rewritten, so Bill would return to the hotel to work on it and then give it to Udo to translate, ready for the next day. They ate most of their meals in the hotel because they had no time to go out.
Before the show opened Bill and James attended the vernissage of his show at the Galerie K in Paris on March 23. It was a great critical success and almost completely sold out, to Bill’s great satisfaction. From there they continued on to Hamburg. The opera opened at the state-owned Thalia Theater on March 31, 1990, and received fifteen standing ovations, lasting exactly twenty-three minutes—close to the record for the theater, and also Bill’s magic number. “Wasn’t that great?” Burroughs asked filmmaker Klaus Maeck. “The devil’s bargain is a classic, and in so many forms—in Hollywood, advertising, job ads—selling your soul, your integrity for games or money or for time. The ultimate form is for time, for immortality.”28 The Black Rider received a good critical reception. Jackie Wullschlager enthused in the Financial Times, “For three hours of graceful, cold artifice, [the actors] look, act, and sound like figures from silent movies. […] Wilson turns children’s drawings into three-dimensional monstrosities. Crooked chairs, two meters high, dangle at odd angles […] pine trees are scissor cut-outs which collapse and grow again like cartoons. […] Waits’ sarcastic ballads, full of folk and blues and rock, call back the scarred idealism and mock simplicity of Kurt Weill, while Burroughs’ monosyllabic banality has here found the setting which makes it seem perfect.”29 The Black Rider was performed in Vienna, Paris, Barcelona, Genoa, Amsterdam, and Berlin and opened for ten performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1993, with later performances in Canada and London, and continues to the present day.
4. Folders
In the course of revising the libretto of The Black Rider, from January to March 1990, Burroughs continued to paint. The opera took up much of his time and the various drafts and rewrites he had to do meant that he was constantly reorganizing his papers in different file folders. He wrote and painted in the same room and, inevitably, one day while painting, he used one of the ochre-colored folders as a palette, mixing his colors on it. Almost immediately, remembering that Paul Klee had remarked that sometimes the way in which the picture is created might be more interesting than the picture itself, he recognized that the folders he had mixed paint on could be seen as paintings in themselves. He began to intentionally create file-folder paintings, painting not only the outsides but the insides as well. As usual, among the swirls of paint, faces and animals emerged. Having decorated many dozens of them, he kept the best as art, and filed his papers in the remainder.
In the spring of 1990, Burroughs was preparing for a major show to be held at Seibu Shibuya Hall in Tokyo, curated by Makito Hayashi and arranged by Mitsuhiro Takemura, who visited Lawrence to make the selection from Burroughs’s work, including the painted folders. Bill’s assistant Steven Lowe described the viewing: “When presented with these painted folders, Mr. Takemura held them in his hands and carefully looked at them. Then he placed them on a low table and arranged them accordion-style, each folder set up on its edges and positioned into the folder next to it. There were fifteen folders, and this elegant grouping became the work entitled ‘Paper Cloud.’ ” It was shown in Tokyo and Sapporo and bought for a private collection.
During that previous winter, Steven Lowe had suggested that Bill might include pages from his novels as part of the collage elements, and also a wider range of objects than he had been using, such as wire, bird feathers, bits of clothing, raw pigment. He suggested that Burroughs sandwich these between sheets of handmade paper and shoot them so that the filling would explode from the back. Many of Burroughs’s works, from the shotgun art to the painted folders, had two sides, not necessarily a front and a back, but in the case of the gun art, an impact side and a result side. The first one of these sandwiched pieces to be shot was done when Mr. Takamura and his party were in Lawrence and they all went to the countryside to shoot guns. During March and June, Burroughs shot nine more of the sandwiched paintings, which became known as the “Thick Pages” series.30 The series could be seen as a collaboration between Burroughs and Lowe.
Many of Burroughs’s shows were organized by José Férez Kuri, a peripatetic art curator from Mexico City who became the director of the October Gallery in London in 1984. In 1988 he gave Burroughs his first show in London—his first abroad—and another there in 1992. He continued to represent Burroughs when he left the October Gallery to become an independent curator in 1991. José divided his time between Lawrence and London and became a close member of the inner circle. He died of a heart attack in 2010, aged fifty-nine, and said, shortly before his death, “I’ve done too many drugs, too much drinking and sex, too much of everything. And I’ve enjoyed it all.” That was why he fitted in so well in Lawrence.
Burroughs had always seen the artworks as a door to the spirit world, an interface to another dimension of memory, psychic experience, and place; like his dreams, his paintings gave him stories. “The paintings write. They tell and foretell stories. Now the pictures are moving, laughing, snarling, talking, screaming, changing, but it is movement in another dimension, not some physical miracle of moving paint.”3
1 Burroughs’s use of his paintings, and his previous use of Brion Gysin’s paintings for the same purpose—as a port of entry to another world of spirits—removes him somewhat from the general contemporary art world. Burroughs knew little about post-Duchampian art, conceptual art, land art, neorealism, minimalism, and the other movements going on while he was painting, nor did he want to know, often joking about them to interviewers. This does not mean that the work was somehow outside the progression of twentieth-century art history; Burroughs was not producing “outsider” or naïve art; he brought many formal elements of composition to his work and was a good colorist; many of his works are very attractive. They worked both as better-than-most examples of late-twentieth-century painting as well as spirit vehicles for Burroughs’s own private vision.
5. Aliens
Burroughs had read and enjoyed Whitley Strieber’s books Communion and Breakthrough and wanted to meet him. Strieber, the author of successful horror stories and a follower of Gurdjieff, had written a book about his purported abduction by aliens. The book has flying saucers in it but does not speculate how mammalian creatures, wearing the current Earthly fashions—blue overalls—managed to travel to Earth at speeds far in excess of the speed of light, but does suggest that they are possibly Earthly in origin: the dead somehow manifest, visitors from the future, visitors from other levels of consciousness or dimensions, and so on. Burroughs made the obvious connection between the people Strieber experienced and his own possession by the Ugly Spirit and wrote a letter to Strieber saying he would love to contact these visitors. Strieber’s wife, Anne, wrote back saying that they had to be sure that he was who he said he was. “We get a lot of crank letters.” Bill replied saying, “I am indeed really me,” and she wrote back to say, “We, after talking it over, would be glad to invite you to come up to the cabin.” And so in 1990 Burroughs spent the weekend with them, accompanied by Bill Rich. He told Victor Bockris, “I had a number of talks with Strieber about his experiences and I was quite convinced he was telling the truth. […] He told me this. ‘When you experience it, it is very definite, very physical, it’s not vague and it’s not like an hallucination, that they are there.’ ”32 Strieber said that Burroughs was almost overly polite, but very curious about his experiences. In My Education Burroughs wrote, “I was convinced that the aliens, or whatever they are, are a real phenomenon. The abductions, in several accounts, involved sexual contacts. Indeed, that would seem to be their purpose.”33
