by Barry Miles
Earlier in 1996, on May 31, Timothy Leary died. After various scares in which he threatened to have himself cryogenically preserved, he finally went out in full live Internet glory. That day Bill received a call from Tim’s son, Zach, to say that Tim was slipping in and out of a coma but would like to talk to him. Bill said of course. Tim got on the line and asked Bill, “Is it true?” Bill, not knowing what he meant, hedged his bets and replied, “Well, I guess it’s true,” and chuckled. “It’s true, Tim.” Then Tim just said, “Well, I love you Bill,” to which Bill replied, “I love you too, Tim.” Leary died about four hours later.”35 His last words were, “Why not?”
Leary was followed two months later by Herbert Huncke, who died on August 8. Bill had seen a bit of Huncke when he was living in New York but he had always refused to allow him to visit him in Kansas. In New York he made sure that Huncke never left the main living room. When he was away and Stewart Meyer was Bunker-sitting, he gave Stew strict instructions that if Huncke visited he was never to be left alone, that he was never to be allowed into the archive room, and must not stay overnight. Huncke of course immediately tried to subvert Bill’s strictures, but Stewart remained firm and Huncke never did manage to steal anything from there.
All through this period, Burroughs had been exhibiting his paintings worldwide. In 1993 there were shows in Kansas City, Madrid, Marseille, Venice, Lyon, and New York; in 1994 shows in Woody Creek, Colorado; Lawrence; Munich; and New York. In 1995 they were in Odense, Denmark; San Francisco; and at the Whitney’s Beat Culture and the New America show in New York, but it was 1996 that was his most spectacular year with shows in New York, Minneapolis, Santa Monica, and Kansas City. Then in July came Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts, a magnificent solo show of over 150 items at the Los Angeles County Museum, curated by Robert S. Sobieszek, complete with an authoritative catalog. This finally put Burroughs on the map in the art world, but it was not until after his death that his work began to be seriously studied abroad, with large, nonselling museum shows mounted in Germany, Austria, Slovenia, and London.
With the Ports of Entry show scheduled to travel to the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art on October 26, it was decided to celebrate the occasion with the Nova Convention Revisited: William S. Burroughs and the Arts. Many of the original New York Nova Convention artists signed up for the event, which was held on November 26: Philip Glass, John Giorno, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and Ed Sanders. They were joined by Deborah Harry and Chris Stein. Michael Stipe made an unannounced guest appearance, joining the Patti Smith band onstage and then singing backing vocals for her. Burroughs had always been impressed by Patti’s impact on her audiences, which he thought of as shamanic, they seemed so energized by her. Though it was largely a musical affair, efforts were made to keep the focus on Burroughs by reading his texts onstage—Patti read from Queer—and showing clips from his readings. Burroughs had originally said he would not attend, but changed his mind at the last minute and appeared onstage at the end to give a brief reading and accept a standing ovation. It was an enjoyable occasion for all. Earlier he gave a lunchtime press conference along with the other main performers in which he explained that he moved to Lawrence so that he could go shooting and keep cats.
3. “I Had Not Thought Death Had Undone So Many”36
Allen Ginsberg’s health had been in decline for some time; he had heart trouble and had fainting fits caused by his diabetes. Ever since the summer of 1996 he had felt tired and fatigued, and he was now taking ten different pills each day, including digitalis, to counteract Bell’s palsy, cramps, water retention, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart problems. He was now seventy and growing visibly weaker. One day in March 1997, he felt so bad that his assistant, Bob Rosenthal, called Joel Gaidemak, Allen’s doctor (and cousin). When he described Allen’s symptoms Gaidemak advised, “Get him in hospital immediately.” Fortunately Allen had a good medical plan and was able to go straight to Beth Israel. They performed a battery of tests over several days. The results came back. He had hepatitis C, but he also had cancer of the liver. The cancer had metastasized everywhere and was “untreatable, incurable.” Allen was told he had from three to six months to live from onset, but they did not know when the onset was. Allen said, “That sounds too long.” His father, Louis, had died from the same disease. One of the first people Allen called was Bill, who wrote in his journal for April 3, “He says, ‘I thought I would be terrified; instead I am exhilarated,’ ” and “Then it hits—a world without the voice of Allen.” Allen drifted into a coma and died in bed in his Lower East Side loft on April 5, 1997. He was seventy. Burroughs wrote, “Allen Ginsberg died (this morning); peaceful, no pain. He was right. When the doctors said 2–4 months, he said: ‘I think less.’ ”37
Allen’s death was reported across the world; he was America’s most famous poet. Bill had to make a formal statement. The New York Times reported his words: “Ginsberg’s death was ‘a great loss to me and to everybody. We were friends for more than 50 years,’ Mr. Burroughs said. ‘Allen was a great person with worldwide influence. He was a pioneer of openness and a lifelong model of candor. He stood for freedom of expression and for coming out of all the closets long before others did. He has influence because he said what he believed. I will miss him.’ ”38 A month later he amplified this thought in his journal: “Allen’s worldwide influence toward openness, glasnost, is unprecedented. He, with the courage of total sincerity, charmed and disarmed the savage Fraternity Beasts.”39 Allen was Bill’s oldest, dearest friend. Allen’s belief in him had got him first published. Without Allen The Naked Lunch would not have been written or assembled. It was Allen who persuaded him to move to the Beat Hotel, which was, in his words, “the most productive time of my life.” And it was Allen who, seeing him in a state of stasis in London, got him back to the States. Allen’s death precipitated a deep depression.
Bill’s own health had been gradually failing for some time, but on April 21, 1997, a successful cataract removal procedure by Dr. Richard Orchard greatly improved his eyesight and enabled him to better enjoy his shooting outings. Ever since the Nova Convention Revisited his friends had noticed a change in him: he was less cranky, less loud and garrulous, more approachable and friendly. Now his friends could get a word in edgewise instead of having to listen to his long monologues. Money was still a concern, and on May 22, 1997, Burroughs made an appearance in a promotional video for the band U2. He played a shopping cart vagrant, dressed in a smart black suit, pushing a huge klieg light in his trolley, tying up the traffic in downtown Kansas City for several hours.40 In his journal he referred to the band as “You Too,” never having seen their name in print.
On July 29, 1997, Bill had his last shooting session at Fred Aldrich’s farm. He was again feeling depressed because his beloved cat Fletch had recently died. TP and Bill were walking by the garage, where Bill had his Toyota parked outside, and TP saw Fletch under the car. There were flies buzzing around his face. Bill called out, “Fletch! Fletch!” but TP told him he was dead. It was as if he had been punched in the sternum. Bill took a step back. He was distraught. It hit him harder than a human death. It was as if the death of a cat reminded him of the deaths of all his loved ones.
Three days later, Bill had a heart attack. About twenty minutes after the first drink of the day he was seated in his green writing chair by the bedroom window, writing in his journal, when he had a coughing fit that precipitated a heart attack. He was discovered by TP, who was cooking dinner for him that night. TP showed up at 4:00 p.m. with the groceries, banged on the door, and shouted their old joke, “Don’t shoot!” Bill was in his bedroom, hunched over in agony, clutching his chest, grimacing and groaning, his almost bald head emerging from his huge green army jacket like a turtle. He said that his heart hurt and he had taken a nitroglycerine tablet. TP called 911, then called James. Bill was still lucid. TP said, “Hide the guns and drugs?” and Bill grunted, “Yeah.” TP recalled, “He had weed and he had
a gun on him. And when paramedics come they don’t want to see a gun on an eighty-three-year-old guy having a heart attack. It’s not good for anybody. I said, ‘Do you want help?’ because he had to take his whole belt off, and he said, ‘No.’ And he got it off and he was brave, he was really brave. It was hurting him but he didn’t seem scared to me. I was more scared.”41 Bill hid his .38 under his pillow. James arrived, followed by the paramedics. Just as Bill was being loaded into the ambulance, Pat Connor, who had a dinner night at Bill’s, drove up. He got out of his car, walked over to Bill, and asked him, “What’s goin’ on?” Bill replied, quoting a Brion Gysin line, “Back in no time.” They were his last words.
TP wondered if he knew then that he was going to die. “He was interested in last words and he had last words books. I don’t know if he had it prepared.” Bill lost consciousness as the ambulance pulled away. Dean Ripa, who was visiting Lawrence, had been expected for dinner and came to the hospital. James asked TP and Dean not to inform anyone, feeling that well-wishers would be a hindrance in those crucial hours. Bill lasted out the night but never regained consciousness. The next day James, TP, and Dean were still at the hospital. That afternoon TP was sitting with Bill alone in the intensive care unit—James and Dean had gone outside to smoke a cigarette—when the nurse looked at the wild spikes on the EKGs and told him, “He’s starting to go,” throwing TP into a quandary. TP remembered, “I don’t want him to die alone, but I don’t want him to die without James. I ran down the stairs and ran out the front door looking for James while William lay there dying. And I didn’t see them. I ran around the entire hospital, looking for ’em. And I didn’t find ’em. So I went back up and they were there.” James had been paged. Bill was still alive.
The nurse pointed to the jagged pattern on the EKG screen and told James, “That’s called an ‘agonal’ pattern,” then she left them. Bill’s eyes were closed, his mouth open. He had a breathing tube through one nostril and many lines leading to hangbags and devices. He seemed to have ceased breathing. James stood by his right shoulder with TP and Dean across from him. No one else was there for the final fifteen minutes. James remembered, “I could see the biomonitor screen, by Dean’s right shoulder; I saw the jagged, spastic, nonrhythmic pattern of his EKG signal slowly give up its mute efforts to restart. Then all the lines were flat. We wept, hard. We composed ourselves at length.” William Seward Burroughs II died at 6:50 p.m. on August 2, 1997. Normally, when the hospital staff are sure the patient is dead, they remove the body from the ward, but James negotiated with the nursing staff to allow him to rest undisturbed. They were reluctant until he explained that he was a Buddhist, and in that tradition it is thought that the soul is much slower to depart from the body than an observer might think. He hoped for six hours; they gave him five.
Several members of Bill’s inner-circle family came to sit with him. David Ohle and Jim McCrary were both out of town. James phoned Wayne Propst and invited him to join them, and Patricia Elliott, an old friend of Bill’s, arrived not long after Bill’s death. She described the scene at Bill’s bedside in her journals: “James came in the room and we hugged. Then James turned to William and clasped him, crying and sobbing in the most utterly broken hearted way. I had never seen James more beautiful. I thought, God, James was father and son to William. The love and respect that I had observed between those two over the years flashed through my thoughts like a bursting series of light.”42
Ira Silverberg, who had remained in close contact with both James and Bill after he and James broke up, flew in as soon as he heard the news. On August 6, James and Ira arrived at Bill’s house at about ten in the morning to pick out the clothes that the funeral director would dress him in for his coffin: his best white shirt and a blue necktie handpainted by Bill; the Moroccan waistcoat, or sedria, in green velvet with gold brocade given him by Brion Gysin; his best black shoes, the ones he used when he performed; James remembered that the CIA called a new assignment “getting new shoes.” They found the least worn of his blue jeans and placed a nineteenth-century Indian-head five-dollar gold piece in the pocket for his journey to the Western Lands. They selected a black sport jacket with a dark green tint and put his reading glasses in his breast pocket and a ballpoint pen in the inside pocket. He also had three joints of top-quality marijuana and a wrap of heroin in his pocket. On his lapel he wore the rosettes of the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. They put his red bandana in his back pocket where he always kept it. Naturally he had to have his gray fedora. By his side was his favorite hickory swordstick and his .38 Special snubnose, fully loaded with five bullets, the one he wore every day and kept under his pillow at night. A huge quantity of flowers was left at the house, and even two weeks later some anonymous person left a fresh bouquet every day.
There was an open-coffin viewing at Liberty Hall, a little theater around the corner from the Eldridge Hotel at 644 Massachusetts and 7th. Burroughs was placed on center stage, framed by the proscenium arch, but when James went to the auditorium to check the sight lines to the coffin, he saw that viewers could not see anything. He asked the undertakers, “Do you think we can prop his head up a little bit, so his forehead and nose are visible from the loge?” So even in death Burroughs was treated like a celebrity, making his last public appearance. James said, “My feeling is, this too is show business.” About a thousand local people came to view, including many of the town’s youth, wearing shorts and jeans, cramming the balcony for the service. José Ferez, who for years had handled Burroughs’s art business, took photographs of Burroughs in his coffin but was offended that some people insisted on kissing him, including John Giorno, who had come to Kansas for the funeral. José reported, “Several people actually kissed him and one woman from the October Gallery kept kissing him full on the mouth.”43 José thought it was disrespectful. TP commented, “I have never seen a corpse kissed before or since. I’ve never seen anybody pose for pictures in front of a corpse before, but then you know I’ve never been to the funeral of a famous person before. It’s a different world and the rules are different. When a famous person dies there’s no rules, there’s no etiquette. It was a fucking free-for-all.” Burroughs was a very formal man, not given to kissing people, but he was vulnerable in death. TP recalled, “I never hugged William. When I got there I’d shake his hand, and on the way out he’d give me the double handshake and stand on the porch and wave as you drove away. But I’d see him just get mauled. You see the look on someone’s face when someone’s hugging ’em and its like, ‘Oh fuck! This person’s grabbed me.’ I saw that ‘Oh fuck’ look a lot of times.”
The thing that upset the close family the most was a widely published text by John Giorno, who wrote, “William Burroughs died on August 2, 1997 at 6:30 in the afternoon following a massive heart attack the day before. He was 83 years old. I was with him when he died and it was one of the best times I ever had with him.”44 John Giorno was in New York when Burroughs died, and to use his death as a way of gathering publicity for himself was seen as being in the worst possible taste. James commented, “It’s just a lie and to me that’s one of the most offensive things that he’s ever done in terms of how I’ve felt about him. It really offended me a lot. But I don’t think John, deep down, could understand why people could be offended by something like that. […] It’s like a little baby looking for attention. That was the one time when I most strongly felt it was exploitative, with him making up that story and deliberately giving the impression that it was true.” Many of Bill’s other close friends, in Kansas and elsewhere, felt the same way.
Burroughs had wanted to be buried in the family mausoleum in the Bellefontaine cemetery. He signed the reservation papers himself and paid the five-hundred-dollar donation toward upkeep. A few days before he died he said at a Thursday night dinner, “I don’t want to be cremated, I want to go down into the ground and ROT!” Bill’s body was driven to St. Louis in a procession including two white stretch limous
ines. At a rest stop in central Missouri they were joined by a hippie bus after Anne Waldman told them who was in the hearse. Before going to Bellefontaine, James had the hearse make a short stop on Euclid Avenue, two doors from the house where Bill was born in the Central West End. The service began at 7:00 p.m. with “For All the Saints Who from Their Labours Rest” by Ralph Vaughan Williams, sung by James’s mother, Selda Grauerholz, who had once been a semiprofessional singer. Tim Miller, from the faculty of the University of Kansas, spoke a few words on behalf of the Lawrence community. Some time before, Burroughs had asked David Ohle if he would read from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” at his funeral, which he now did. This was followed by a recording of Bill reading. James gave the closing address. The coffin was closed at 9:30, but the next day James asked the morticians to open it again for one last look. Bill’s friend, the artist and weapons expert David Bradshaw, was with him. James handed him Bill’s favorite gun, his “snubby,” and Bradshaw placed the pistol at Burroughs’s thigh, near his hand.
