Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Burroughs was a little upset that the aliens made no attempt to contact him, and in the course of an emotional interview with Victor Bockris (Victor was the emotional one—he had a strong sense of being invaded himself), Burroughs said, “I think I am one of the most important people in this fucking world and if they’d had any sense they would have manifested. […] It may mean it was not propitious for them to come and pick me at that particular time. It may mean that they would contact at a later date, or it may mean that they look upon me as the enemy. […] We have no means of knowing what their real motives are. They may find that my intervention is hostile to their objectives. And their objectives may not be friendly at all.”34

  As far as Burroughs was concerned, he and Strieber had likely met up with the same thing, expressed in a different way. “When I go into my psyche at a certain point I meet a very, very hostile, very strong force. It’s as definite as if I’d met somebody attacking me in a bar. We usually come to a stand-off but I don’t think that I’m necessarily winning or losing.” In Bill’s opinion, the aliens—if they were indeed creatures external to our own unconscious life—were abducting people in order to have sex with them. Strieber’s aliens wanted him to get a bigger erection than the one they had somehow managed to induce. In order to attract them to Lawrence, Burroughs let the grass on his lawn grow long and then had a patch of it cut in the shape of an erect penis, like making crop circles. Strieber received more alien visits, but sadly they never came for Bill. Strieber called the aliens the Grays, and they soon entered Burroughs’s cosmography. Five months before his death, Burroughs still remained fascinated by the subject. In a journal entry for February 3, 1997, he wrote:

  The Grays apparently [are] control Aliens, who have lost the ability to create, a dying race that needs blood and semen from humans. Bad folk those Grays.

  I recall that Whitley Strieber was accused of working for the Grays. […] Why are abductions and contacts always to mediocre or inferior minds? Why don’t they come and see ME?

  Because they don’t want to, are afraid to contact anyone with advanced spiritual awareness.

  The Grays want to make people stupider. Anyone with real perception is a danger to them. A deadly danger.35

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  My title for my memoirs was My Past Is an Evil River. From Verlaine. I’m looking back there but I’m looking back at a stranger. I said, “What in hell did you do this for? Don’t you realize that even if you’d hit the goddam glass you’re endangering these people sitting on the couch?” Again and again I’m looking at a stranger that I really don’t know at all. […] Here was a boy coming on to you, why didn’t you accept him, what was wrong with you at that moment? […] Again and again I’ve said, “What the hell was I thinking about?” I think a lot of people looking back would say, “What possessed me to do that?”—literally talking about possession. […] Looking back, in the last ten years I would say I’ve really gotten myself in control of myself so I know what the hell I am doing.1

  1. The Quotidian Life

  Cronenberg completed the fifth draft of his script of Naked Lunch on January 20, 1991. Bill read it and telephoned his approval. He still had his reservations but recognized he was dealing with Hollywood. Writing in September 1991, before the film was completed, Burroughs said, “I was dismayed, naturally, to see the scenes that David wrote in which ‘Bill Lee’ shoots his wife, ‘Joan’; but on reflection, I feel that the scenes in his script are so different from the tragic and painful episodes in my own life from which he drew his inspiration that no intelligent person can mistake the movie for a factual account.” Burroughs had other misgivings, writing, “For reasons best known to himself, David chose to treat the homosexuality of ‘Lee’ as a somewhat unwelcome accident of circumstance and plot, rather than an innate characteristic. Whether this is because of David’s own heterosexuality, or his assessment of the realities of making and releasing a multi-million dollar movie, or other factors, I cannot say.”2

  As filming got under way, in early June Burroughs and James were invited to Toronto to visit the set. Film critic Chris Peachment, also at the set, gave a description of Burroughs at seventy-seven: “He is still slim, if a little bowed, and still active, with the help of an elegant black cane which is probably more decorative than useful. His face looks the same as it always has in photographs: thin, mocking, with the papery whiteness of the reformed junkie. […] His manner is gentle and exquisitely courteous; his voice and sense of humour both dry as a bone. He is also something of a dandy, dressed in a long black leather trench-coat (‘My Gestapo coat’) and a jet-black fedora with a discreet Stetson label on the hatband.”3

  Burroughs was now very settled in his ways. He no longer liked to travel and lived in a stoned world of his own. At eight o’clock he awoke and took 60 milligrams of methadone in liquid form, then he would return to bed and doze for an hour until it kicked in and a warmth spread through his body. At nine he would rise and putter about in his slippers, pajamas, and dressing gown and start the day with a glass of tap water into which he emptied a load of sugar. He mashed a lemon into it and drank it down. Then he made breakfast. Often this was a soft-boiled egg with “soldiers”—toast sliced into fingers to dip in the egg, something he enjoyed in London, and that his Welsh nanny probably made for him. TP, his longtime assistant, remembered, “I’ve never had an egg like he used to have them. He had these little cups, like soft-boiled eggs. He had some English stuff, he liked tea. He liked to drink tea in the afternoons.” He had two cups of tea with lots of sugar. Feeding the cats took some time, and after that he would shave and get dressed, by which time it was almost midday. In keeping with his role as el hombre invisible, he dressed anonymously, Kansas style: a blue work shirt, baggy blue jeans, a jacket from the Gap, an oversize bomber jacket. Instead of his fedora, he wore a trucker cap with the name of a feed store on it. His suit and tie were always worn for readings, art openings, and any formal occasions or out-of-town visits. He usually only snacked for lunch, unless visitors came over. In the afternoons he might walk in the garden and practice his knife throwing, before reading or flipping through magazines. He had piles of magazines in every room: Gun Tests, Gun World, Gun Digest, American Survival Guide, Knife, UFO Universe, Soldier of Fortune, subscription copies of National Geographic and the International Herald Tribune, which Bill always read in London and Paris, and the Weekly World News, a fictional news tabloid sold at the supermarket that Bill loved to read that specialized in alien abductions, mutants, “world’s fattest” stories, urban legends, Elvis sightings, and the revelation in 1994 that twelve U.S. senators were aliens from other planets. Bill particularly liked Ed Anger’s vitriolic right-wing column and would sit chuckling over it. (The Weekly World News staff would joke about how many of their readers actually believed this stuff; apparently many of them did.)

  Bill had a large library of pulp fiction, pseudoscience subjects, natural history books, and books on weapons and self-defense. Books like Basic Stick Fighting for Combat, Deadly Substances, Personal Defense, Firearms of the American West, The Poor Man’s James Bond, How to Kill Volume Five by John Minnery, and Improvised Munitions Black Book overflowed the shelves and were stacked in piles alongside doctor books, thrillers, and a large collection of cat books: The Life, History and Magic of the Cat, Cats Incredible!, The Complete Book of Cats. One bookcase contained a seventeen-volume complete set of Joseph Conrad, alongside Denton Welch, Jonathan Swift, foreign editions of his own work, and books by Gysin and Ginsberg. On the top, amid the clutter of objects, were an animal skull and an engraved plaque with one of his favorite aphorisms: “It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.”

  In New York, Burroughs did not drink until 6:00 p.m., but in Kansas this gradually got moved forward. By 1991 it was 4:00 p.m. and then 3:30 p.m. In London he drank whiskey, Johnnie Walker Red Label, but in New York he switched to vodka and Coca-Cola. Burroughs drank for most of his life and always tried to ration it, to a certa
in extent. When he traveled in South America he figured that a fifth would last for three days and a quart for four. A quart is thirty-two ounces of alcohol. In Kansas he usually bought Popov vodka in two-liter bottles because it had the ounces marked on the container; a bottle lasted four days. It had the added advantage of being very cheap, which didn’t matter because the terrible taste was disguised by the Coca-Cola he mixed with it. His other cheap vodka of choice was Viaka.

  After his first drink, and a joint, he would either write or paint until dinnertime. “I smoke as much pot as I feel like, two or three joints is enough. I smoke pot in the afternoon for work. If I can get it, it makes all the difference. It’s just that extra spark. Say I’ve got an article to write. Now, I don’t like to write articles, it’s hard work, it’s all gotta be in the right place. If I smoke a joint I’ll get an extra levity or something in it. It takes the edge off of it. A three-thousand-word article, that’s a week’s work. People think you can just sit down and dash this off, well you can’t. You can do it but it won’t be right. The easiest thing to write when you’re really going is narrative. It just flows out. The hardest thing to write is description.”4 He awoke several times in the night as he was a very light sleeper, and sometimes smoked a joint before going back to sleep.

  There was a roster posted in the kitchen showing which of a number of young men would cook for him. They would arrive around five o’clock to join him in a drink and to make dinner; Burroughs ate early, around 6:00–6:15 p.m. On Thursday he knew he would eat well because David Ohle was a good cook; on Jim McCrary’s nights he didn’t worry because, as TP (Tom Peschio) put it, he and Jim drank most of their dinner. Steven Lowe and James were both accomplished cooks, and TP had a few dishes that Bill liked. As the years passed there were more and more visitors, so that it was rare that Bill just dined with his cook. There were usually guests, even if it was only James.

  Bill retired early, at 8:30 or 9:00 p.m.; guests knew it was time to go elsewhere when he began to take off his shirt. In the last year of his life he also took an afternoon nap. He might go for a walk, though there was little to see except houses very similar to his own. Whenever he left the premises he made sure he was suitably armed. He always carried a handgun in a holster on his belt. Normally this was a Smith & Wesson .38 snubbie, but some people, such as his doctor and his hairdresser, felt uncomfortable staring down at such a weapon, so in those cases he would wear a small derringer with a two-inch barrel that could fire five rounds and fitted unobtrusively into his waistcoat. (This is quite legal in Kansas.) In addition he always carried a Cobra, a type of steel whip; a blade disguised as a credit card; and a can of BodyGuard, a virulent mixture of Mace and capsicum pepper in a liquid spray. “It’ll stop a Doberman pinscher dead in its tracks.”5 In the cellar his friend George Kaull constructed a three-meter (ten feet) long silencer, a long padded tube made from chicken wire and fiberglass insulation and mounted horizontally, which enabled him to shoot in his house without anyone hearing him. They called it the “Shooting Tube.” He would stick the gun in and fire away at a target at the other end of the basement. Six rounds from a .38 sounded like taps upstairs in the living room and the neighbors could hear nothing.6

  Bill’s obsession with weapons was something that always disturbed Allen Ginsberg, who quite simply didn’t believe that Bill needed so many to protect himself from his so-called enemies. “I don’t have any enemies,” Allen claimed, but Bill’s worldview was very different; he saw himself as continually under threat. When James once broached the subject and asked him, “What do you think it means with all the guns, Bill? Did you ever think about that? I mean, are you afraid of something?” Bill grew quite angry and emphatic: “YES! I’m terrified of everything! Don’t you understand?” James felt that he wasn’t bragging about it; if anything, he was probably a little bit ashamed. Jim McCrary often accompanied Bill on his shooting sessions. Bill was obsessed with target practice. He kept his used targets and noted down the date, the time, the shot, the gun, whether he had a vodka before or after. Bill said a vodka steadied his hand. Jim McCrary thought that “he never forgave himself for missing that time in Mexico and […] my feeling was he never forgave himself. He never felt good, or got over it. He was that kind of a guy.” Jim recalled that sometimes during a drinking session Burroughs would slump forward, holding his head in his hands, saying, “Joan! Joan!” Her death was always with him.

  His interest in guns attracted other “gun guys.” Hunter S. Thompson arranged to visit but almost didn’t get to Lawrence. Jim McCrary remembered, “Hunter was really excited because he’d brought a gun for William.” It was a .454 Casull, the most powerful handgun manufactured at the time, and came with a huge scope mounted on top. Each round cost a dollar and would go a mile. Because he had so many guns with him he was unable to fly and so he drove to see Burroughs from Colorado. His car broke down in the middle of nowhere, in a dry county, but he managed to get the car fixed and drove at once to Manhattan, the nearest town. There was a basketball game on and Hunter and girlfriend settled down at a bar to watch it. Jim told the story: “They got all fucked up, and he got ready to leave and ‘where’d my keys go?’ and the bartender says, ‘I’ve got your keys and I don’t think you should drive.’ Whoah! Hunter went berserk, but luckily his girlfriend calmed him down.” He was still in a state when they checked into the Eldridge Hotel. “It was just chaos. He had the whole place going in circles, switching rooms, him and his girl. He created a scene. He stopped at some restaurant and sat outside and he was eating and all the servers and everyone were starting to figure out who this was, and in the midst of it all he had a big snuff box full of coke which he dropped on the ground and was crawling under the table! But when he came over to see William he sat here [quietly, respectfully] like at the feet of the guru.” The next day they went shooting, and Hunter was impressed that Bill was able to fire the .454 without being knocked over by the recoil.

  William Burroughs Communications acquired its own office in town and Bill took over the front bedroom of his house, which James had used as his office, as an art studio. Paintings were arranged on racks according to size. The walls showed evidence of his target practice with a BB gun. After the filming of Naked Lunch, Cronenberg gave Burroughs one of the six-foot-high Mugwumps. Burroughs sat it on a chair in the corner of the studio, where it unnerved visitors, who were not expecting to encounter an extraterrestrial when they entered the room. It was in this room that privileged guests like Allen Ginsberg stayed. Most people stayed in the Eldridge Hotel or, when Burroughs Communications acquired a compound near Bill’s house with a number of houses on it, in one of the spare bedrooms there. During the day he often worked with Jim McCrary, who worked for William Burroughs Communications from 1991 until 2001, and who typed up many of Bill’s handwritten or poorly typed manuscripts. McCrary found working for Bill a pleasure and he became a good friend. McCrary remembered how excited Bill would get for Halloween. He’d carve pumpkins, put on a scary mask, and wait by the door with a bowl of candy, even though not many kids came down his street. “He’s like the great, kind of crazy uncle I never had,” McCrary said.7

  Allen Ginsberg often came to stay, and got to know all the members of Bill’s inner circle. Jim McCrary said, “Allen certainly enjoyed the rest and privacy he found in Lawrence, and William certainly enjoyed seeing him. There was a quiet, close, emotional aura around these two as they visited in William’s house. There was gracefulness between them and it was private—they didn’t perform at all. I guess when you know one another forty-plus years—you don’t have to do squat. There you go.”8 Allen took on some of the cooking duties when he stayed, and Jim McCrary remembered one time when Allen made some macrobiotic turnip stew. William took one look at it and said, “Jim, go to the store and get some lamb chops.” And Allen said, “But William, I made this for you!” David Ohle had a fond memory of them both. “One unforgettable moment was seeing William and Allen Ginsberg early one morning in their pajamas trying
to chase raccoons out of William’s kitchen with a walking cane. The coons came in through the cat door and opened the cat food drawer and helped themselves almost every night.”9 The drawers were supposed to be secured with canes through the handles, but Bill spent so much time feeding and fussing with the cats that the drawer was in more or less constant use.

  Another regular visitor, who visited a half dozen times, was the painter George Condo. Jim McCrary remembered, “The other person he really liked was George Condo, they really had a good time together […] hanging out together out on the back porch. He came from New York. He didn’t drive because he’s a New Yorker. He’d bring tons of food and wine and dope and they really did like being around each other and they worked together on some collaborative paintings. I think George kinda got him going, just by playing with him, and getting stoned with him.”10

  Bill’s friends and support group divided visitors into two groups, as McCrary put it. “Allen always had a project that he was doing, and he would try and get William involved. John Giorno came a lot and stayed, but the difference was, Allen always had a project he was doing and it didn’t involve William. But Giorno always had a project where he wanted William to do stuff.”11