Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Sometimes Bill went fishing. He had bought a cabin on Lone Star Lake, cheap because he could put up the cash. He was right on the lake with a small dock where he could moor his ten-foot-long flat-bottomed aluminum boat (bought for just $270, a real bargain). “I likes to row out in the middle of the lake and just let the boat drift. I hear tell there’s been flying saucers sighted out here on the lake, and I’m hoping maybe one will pick me up.”12 Right in front of his dock was the best fishing for catfish in the lake, but Bill was after bluegills or bass. Catfish screamed when they were pulled from the water and snapped like an animal; besides, they were very difficult to clean.

  Over the years, Burroughs had accumulated a lot of possessions. Inside the front door, a walnut side table was crowded with curios, many of them anthropological items given to him as gifts. Next to this a cane stand was filled with his large collection of walking sticks and canes, including a swordstick, many with strange carved handles. A long green tube was labeled “Blowgun Survival Weapon.” Bill loved demonstrating this one. It fired three-inch steel darts at about two hundred miles per hour and the front door and living room walls were pockmarked from its use. A dining table and chairs stood to the right of the front door. His collection of art had also grown and all but two of his Gysins, along with works by Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, and other artists he had collaborated with, were eventually placed on deposit at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas for safety.

  On Thursdays, James, or another of the regular drivers, would arrive at 8:00 a.m. to take Bill to his methadone clinic in Kansas City. Afterward he and James would have breakfast at Nichols or the K.C. Diner. Eventually he was permitted to pick up on a biweekly schedule and so James would take him out to breakfast in Lawrence so that his house could be cleaned. Burroughs always kept a quantity of methadone back, stored in a large glass bottle, so that he had a few weeks’ supply in the event that the roads became impassable in the winter and he couldn’t get to Kansas City to his clinic. Thursday being special, this was also the day when his friends gathered round for the weekly “boys’ night” get-together. Among the regulars were Wayne Propst, Fred Aldrich, Steven Lowe, Dean Ripa, David Ohle, Phil Heying, Jim McCrary, George Kaull, TP, and of course James Grauerholz. These were Bill’s shooting buddies, his fishing buddies, the people who cooked his meals, went with him to readings, fed his cats when he was away. They were his support system, his friends, and his family.

  Another close friend, much younger than the others, was Michael Emerton, James Grauerholz’s lover since 1985. To quote James, “Michael was a curly-headed, hard-drinking nineteen-year-old from Kansas City. His adoptive mother had died when he was sixteen, and he never recovered from the loss. Burroughs and Emerton took to each other immediately, and Michael loved William and his cats.”13 TP was introduced to Burroughs and his circle by Michael and became a close friend of his. “Michael was a holy terror, that’s why William loved him so much, he was so much fucking fun. Everywhere you went with him was like trouble. In the end he troubled himself to death, but man, there was sparks shootin’ off him. And if you got into a beef with him, you know, good luck. He was really mischievous, man. He was a playmate, he was a great playmate.”14 TP described how Bill and Michael would play around with demonology. “It was real, totally real. [Bill] was like a real shaman. He would be really into something, even though he kinda knew it was bullshit, but he would kinda have fun with it. He would go off on kicks and some of them were kinda silly, but at the same time he was like a twelve-year-old kid, he still was able to make believe. […] He didn’t seem uptight. With stories some people have, it’s hard to recognize William from other eras.”

  Burroughs appreciated these friends who had become his family. His friends in Mexico City had been largely American expats; in Tangier he entered a virtually all-gay community; in Paris he found fellow psychic explorers; in London he moved in elegant gay circles; in New York he was the center of a largely drug-oriented group of much younger people; and now, in Lawrence, he was back among the midwesterners: taciturn, deep-thinking, people with no “side” or pretensions. Most were much younger than him, the generation that had been hippies in the sixties; writers, painters, journalists, photographers. They were caring and looked after him for the last sixteen years of his life. In 1991 he mused, “I left New York almost ten years ago and I haven’t missed it for one single day.”15

  Burroughs did not think he had another book in him when he completed The Western Lands in 1987, but certain themes preoccupied him and he began writing them down. The resulting book, Ghost of Chance, was finished by June 1991. Burroughs did not see it as a continuation of the trilogy. “This is something quite different. It certainly is not in any sense to be regarded as a continuation.”16 He told Nicholas Zurbrugg “what’s in there. The whole matter of lemurs, Madagascar, and also Christ. Who was Christ? Did he actually perform the miracles attributed to him? Yes, I think he did. As you know, the Buddhists are very, very dubious of miracles. They say, ‘If you can, don’t.’ Because you’re disturbing the natural order, interfering with the natural order, with incalculable long range results.”17 He discussed this issue with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa in March 1987. “It’s so basically unspiritual, Allen. [Jesus] seemed to be a perfectly healthy boy. Suddenly, at the age of 30, he breaks out in this rash of miracles, performing the most irresponsible acts. He started by bringing back the dead! Whatever for? What a dreary and materialistic concept. Curing lepers, walking on the water, for chrissakes?”18

  Burroughs had been experiencing tiredness and chest pains for some time and his doctor had given him nitroglycerine pills to take with him when he went on reading tours or to art openings. Toward the end of June 1991 he spent five days in Toronto, during which he had several bad attacks. “Excruciating pain, radiating down the left arm and up to the jaw. Popping nitro pills like peanuts. It comes in waves and nails you down.”19 Bill Rich met him at the airport in Kansas City and drove him back to Lawrence through a hailstorm with hail the size of golf balls. The insurance companies had to pay out millions for dented cars and shattered roof tiles. Burroughs saw Dr. Hiebert, who sent him straight to the hospital, saying he should never have permitted Bill to go to Toronto. Another three or four days and he would have had a massive heart attack. Dye X-rays showed that a major artery was 98 percent blocked. Six days later at St. Francis Hospital in Topeka he received an angioplasty to open a narrowed artery. It was soon clear to Bill’s cardiologist, John Hiebert, that Bill needed a coronary bypass.

  Back at St. Francis, he was given a shot of morphine in his shoulder, near his neck. The nurse told him, “This is morphine.” Bill said, “Fine. Shoot it in my dear, shoot it in.” The doctor wrote on his chart, “Give Mr. Burroughs as much morphine as he wants.”20 James was there two hours before the dawn operation and held his hand when he was on the gurney. James remembered, “It was just him and me. I was there when he woke up from the anesthesia, that’s family.” While trying to get out of bed unassisted to use the bathroom, Bill fell and fractured his hip, giving a scream that was heard through several floors of the hospital. He was allowed home after three weeks. His journal entry for July 27, 1991, read, “In that hospital there were interludes of blissful, painless tranquillity. (I start awake with a cry of fear.) Slipping, falling, deeper and deeper into easeful rest after the perilous journey, silent peace by the afternoon lake where the sun never sets and it is always late afternoon.”21 After the operation Bill was incapacitated for some time and was unable to feed himself. Allen Ginsberg came to stay and helped him out for a while.

  In 1992, Burroughs became very interested in Indian shamanism and took up the offer by his friend Bill Lyon, an anthropologist who specialized in shamanism and now lived in the Stone House, to arrange a sweat lodge purification ceremony for him. Allen came to stay for it, but James held back, not wanting to experiment in religious practices. Burroughs felt that the ceremony did more for him than all his years of psychotherapy
in identifying “the Ugly Spirit” and, if not banishing it, giving him more control over it. He was exposed to Native American culture all the time because the Haskell Indian Nations University was not far from him and he could hear their dances from his backyard.

  On Thursday September 17, 1992, Bill set out for his methadone clinic in Kansas City, driven by Michael Emerton in his BMW. Rain was coming down in sheets, reducing visibility to just a few feet beyond the car hood, but Michael passed the freeway tollbooth at sixty-five miles per hour. Burroughs just began to say, “For Christ’s sake, Michael, slow down and pull over,” when the car hydroplaned and slammed into the guardrail, then skidded across the highway and into the ditch. They sat there, dumb. Then the door opened and a young man asked, “Can you walk?” Bill checked and found he was unhurt. “Better move away,” the man said. “The car might catch fire.” Another young man helped Michael from the car. “You guys are lucky you’re not dead.” The men drove them to the local truck stop. On September 22, an announcement appeared in the classified ads section of the Lawrence Journal-World: “Card of thanks. To express out heartfelt thanks to the two young motorists who helped us out of a wrecked BMW 6mi. E. of Lawrence on turnpike on Thurs., Sept. 17, 1992. William Burroughs & Michael Emerton.”

  Seven weeks later, on November 4, Michael committed suicide, using a gun given to him by Burroughs. James found the body. He and Michael had been together for eight years and though they had recently broken up the effect on James was devastating. Bill gave him some methadone, which helped. That night James stayed with Bill and in the middle of the night crawled into bed with him weeping. “We were weeping together in each other’s arms, spooning, and somehow slept through the night.” Burroughs wrote, “We live in the snow on Michael’s grave falling softly like the descent of their last end on all the living and the dead, we live in the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, in the last and greatest of human dreams.”22 Burroughs dedicated My Education to him.

  My Education, published in 1995, was transcribed into a working manuscript by Jim McCrary, assisted by David Ohle, over a period of several years from a collection of scraps of paper, index cards, and sheets of one-finger typing, and was reviewed and edited by James. The characters are the now familiar roll call of the dead: his mother—the eating his mother’s back dream—his father, his brother, Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin, Antony Balch, Mikey Portman, Joan, Billy Jr., and Kells Elvins. Others from the past include Jack Anderson, Lucien Carr, Gregory Corso, and Alan Watson. The action, such as it is, takes place in sets from his past, such as Wheeler’s restaurant on Old Compton Street, Soho, where he used to dine with Francis Bacon;23 Panama; Mexico City; Boulder; Lawrence; the Parade Bar in Tangier; 44 Egerton Gardens, the rooming house he stayed in when taking his apomorphine cure in 1956; Portland Place, a block from where he grew up: “Empty house. Leaves blowing, drifting like shreds of time. Radio silence on Portland Place…”24

  Ian Sommerville dominates the book, with more than twenty references; sometimes they make it, sometimes Ian refuses. Burroughs remembered a dream from when they lived together in the Lottery Building in Tangier. “Ian said, ‘I am a woman who looks like a man. I am your dead self’ and crawls away on all fours.”25 Ian’s presence in the book is overwhelming, the failure of their relationship one of Burroughs’s biggest regrets. “Ian in Tangier there by the trees full of twittering sparrows. ‘Make it with me!’ ”26 But Bill would not, and Ian appears to have gone mad because of it. Ian was always on his mind. Udo Breger remembered that on a visit to Lawrence Burroughs twice called him “Ian” by accident.

  Brion Gysin features almost as much as Ian, always there on the edge of his thoughts. Burroughs makes a sentimental association between his cat and the women in his life: “Little Calico is a delightful female beast like Jane Bowles and Joan and mother.”27 Burroughs called all his cats “my beast.” His new friends were beginning to make their presence felt—Wayne Propst, David Ohle, George Kaull, Dean Ripa, Bill Rich, Mark Ewert—but his New York period is not represented. It is a book by a largely contented old man, sorting out his memories, assessing his life. “Today as I made my bed at 10:00 a.m., I am thinking that I am by and large a very happy man.”28

  2. Kurt Cobain

  Working with David Cronenberg introduced Burroughs to a new audience; the fans of Rabid, Scanners, and Videodrome now added Burroughs to their list of cult figures. His work with Tom Waits and Robert Wilson had consolidated his position as elder statesman of the edgy avant-garde, and filming with Gus Van Sant gave him even more mainstream exposure. Burroughs was now famous and had to handle the downside of fame. Mostly this involved dealing with the fans who somehow found out his address and turned up on his porch unannounced. He usually had one of his support team there so they were not too much of a problem. Then there were the visiting celebrities: Chris Stein from Blondie, who was an old friend from New York and who stayed in Bill’s spare bedroom/painting studio; Patti Smith, whom he knew from New York. Patti had a crush on him that he managed to handle without too much distress on either side; the members of Sonic Youth, who visited several times, the second time bringing along Michael Stipe from R.E.M. The most celebrated visitor was Kurt Cobain, a huge Burroughs fan, with whom Burroughs made a record. The collaboration was Cobain’s idea. Burroughs, of course, had no idea who he was and had never heard of Nirvana. Bill recorded a text called “The ‘Priest’ They Called Him” at his house on September 25, 1992, and it was sent to Cobain in Seattle, who overdubbed a guitar accompaniment of rather attractive psychedelic noodling at the Laundry Room Studios, Seattle, in November. The result was an extended play, one of Cobain’s most obscure recordings. Cobain was delighted and wrote in his journal, “I’ve collaborated with one of my only Idols William Burroughs and I couldn’t feel cooler.”29 Encouraged, Cobain then faxed Burroughs asking if he would play a crucifixion victim in a promo video for Nirvana’s next single, “Heart-Shaped Box.” Burroughs politely declined. This is perhaps not surprising as the opening scene of the video in Cobain’s script ran as follows: “William and I sitting across from one another at a table (black and white) lots of Blinding Sun from the windows behind us holding hands staring into each others eyes. He gropes me from behind and falls dead on top of me. Medical footage of sperm flowing through penis. A ghost vapor comes out of his chest and groin area and enters my Body.”

  Cobain’s wish to meet Burroughs was granted in October 1993, during the first week of a Nirvana tour when his tour manager Alex MacLeod drove Kurt to Lawrence. MacLeod remembered, “Meeting William was a real big deal for him. It was something he never thought would happen.”30 As they drove away, Burroughs said to James, “There’s something wrong with that boy; he frowns for no good reason.” Burroughs later described the meeting: “Cobain was very shy, very polite, and obviously enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t awestruck at meeting him. There was something about him, fragile and engagingly lost. He smoked cigarettes but didn’t drink. There were no drugs. I never showed him my gun collection.”31 Burroughs gave him a painting, while Cobain gave him a Leadbelly biography that he had signed. Cobain explained the reason for this in an interview: “I don’t think he’s ever claimed to be a rock ’n’ roll lover, y’know? But he’s taught me a lot of things through his books and interviews that I’m really grateful for. I remember him saying in an interview, ‘These new rock ’n’ roll kids should just throw away their guitars and listen to something with real soul, like Leadbelly.’ I’d never heard about Leadbelly before so I bought a couple of records, and now he turns out to be my absolute favorite of all time in music. I absolutely love it more than any rock ’n’ roll I ever heard.”32 Kurt Cobain turned a shotgun on himself on April 5, 1994. There was a rumor that he had spent his last days staring fixedly at a Dreamachine, but this was later dismissed as a hoax. Burroughs commented upon his death, “The thing I remember about him is the deathly grey complexion of his cheeks. It wasn’t an act of will for Kurt to kill himself. As far as I was co
ncerned, he was dead already.”33

  Burroughs had worked with musicians before. He wrote lyrics to a song called “Old Lady Sloan” for a local Lawrence band managed by Bill Rich called the Mortal Micronotz, produced by James Grauerholz in October 1982.34 The first large-scale musical accompaniment of Burroughs’s work came with the album Dead City Radio in 1990, produced by Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, where Burroughs’s readings were variously accompanied by Sonic Youth, John Cale, Donald Fagen, Lenny Pickett, Chris Stein, and others, all of which was good preparation for his collaboration with Tom Waits on The Black Rider. He worked with Laurie Anderson and was featured on a number of albums by Material and Bill Laswell.

  In 1994 Burroughs was eighty. He was no longer writing except for occasional journal entries. He rarely gave readings or interviews, and just wanted a quiet life, though he did appear along with Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure on May 19 at a reading at Town Hall in New York connected with the Beat Generation conference at New York University. However, when Wieden & Kennedy, Nike’s advertising agency, approached Burroughs with an offer to appear in a TV ad, James Grauerholz decided that it was worth doing, given the likelihood of some very large medical bills in the near future. Nike had previously made controversial ads using Spike Lee and Dennis Hopper. Burroughs’s ad does not mention Nike. He appears on a hand-held television screen with athletes, presumably wearing Nike Air Max shoes, running and jumping over it as he intones things like, “The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.” Nike PR manager Judy Smith explained, “He was chosen because we knew he could pull off this role as a quirky, scientific, prophetic technology wiz. Burroughs isn’t identified in the commercial because the role he’s playing has nothing to do with his history as a writer or his reputation in the counterculture.” Nike didn’t expect their fourteen-year-old audience to know who he was, but there were extra kudos for those who did. It seems unlikely that the ad, which was very ambiguous, sold any additional shoes for the company, but it added much-needed funds to Bill’s bank account. Predictably, a wail of criticism that Burroughs had sold out went up, mostly from people who had a regular wage check coming in from a job in the straight world. But Burroughs’s world was never black-and-white, either/or; in his 1965 Paris Review interview he said, “I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can’t we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?” He was not opposed to advertising. It is true that he would not have made the ad in 1968, when he would definitely have identified Nike as part of the control system, but in his old age his main concern was survival, and in the United States good medical attention costs money.