Chapter Forty-Eight

Being under psychic attack, depression, anxiety, fear of some impending danger, when you sift it down is a feeling of a hostile presence. The important thing is to find out where it is coming from. When you do that, the battle is pretty well won, because once identified and clearly seen it disperses.¹

1. New York Days

Bill returned to New York from Boulder on the last day of August 1979 to spend the winter. He was now the center of a circle that included John Giorno, Victor Bockris, Stewart Meyer, and Howard Brookner. Brookner had an MA in art history and film from New York University Film School. He had wanted to make a twenty-minute portrait of Burroughs as an NYU project but was persuaded by James Grauerholz to scrap that and film the Nova Convention instead. He filmed many of the stage performances and surrounding social events. Brookner decided that for his senior thesis he would like to make a full-length documentary about Burroughs. Bill agreed, a contract was signed, and Howard started work. Bill liked to have him around: he was gay and a heroin addict, so he fitted right in. Howard kept filming and filming and didn’t know how to complete it. Years went by. Burroughs commented, “You wonder why in hell he didn’t plan it better. I think that Howard does have a lot of silly ideas that cost a lot of money and didn’t go into the film.”² By 1982 he had sixty hours of film, and Burroughs was getting irritated because Howard had exclusive right to film him, and other more professional people were being prevented from doing so. Howard did not know how to complete the film. The BBC eventually solved the problem.

In October 1982, at the Final Academy, a conference/celebration of Burroughs and his work in London, the BBC approached Burroughs to film the event or at least film him with Francis Bacon for their arts documentary series Arena. They were told they had to use Brookner’s footage, to which they reluctantly agreed, and they flew Brookner to London to see the rushes and discuss it. Alan Yentob, Nigel Finch, and Anthony Wall filmed a new interview with Burroughs with BBC staffer John Waters in Lawrence, and filmed him with Francis Bacon. They did rostrum shots of Burroughs’s books—which is why there are British editions in the film—added a bit of honky-tonk music, and dropped in sections of Antony Balch’s sixties footage from Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups. They transmitted it in February 1983. Brookner was so relieved to have the film completed that he used the BBC TV edit exactly as it was when he released the film for theatrical exhibition in the United States six months later.

Frank Zappa was interested in doing a musical of Naked Lunch, and on September 12, 1979, he took Burroughs to see The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, a musical that had run for over a year. Had it come to anything it would have caused some unpleasantness with Brion, whose film script for Naked Lunch contained a number of songs that Bill absolutely hated, one of the main reasons he was so lukewarm about the project. Bill had not seen a musical in years and enjoyed it.

Burroughs was then spending a lot of time with Stew Meyer, who acted very much as his personal assistant. Stew drove him to and from the airport, scored dope, and ran errands. It was a very druggy period. Stew kept a diary record of events:

Friday October 5th 1979

Giorno called the office late afternoon tells me dinner with Bill is set for six. I left reefer at home but Al gave me some gummy strong shish and I picked up a few glassines for me’n the Old Doc on Rivington just east of Houston Street. The Puerto Rican social clubs are lined up on that block. Thriving marketplace for coke, dope, and street yerba.

Thursday October 25th 1979

Bill: “Put that coke away we don’t have to feed every vagrant nostril in town.” I put it away before the guests arrived.

John Giorno has pointed out that Bill’s fame may have actually saved his life. Many of the junkies he was shooting up with in the Bunker were also gay, and several of them, including Howard Brookner, subsequently died of AIDS. Burroughs’s seniority meant that he always got the first shot, so he always had a clean needle and was never exposed to the blood of the other people using the same works.

Bill’s affair with Cabell Hardy was coming to a close. Though William Burroughs Communications was now based in Kansas, James still had to make visits to New York, where he stayed at the Bunker. Bill was traveling a lot and had allowed Cabell and Poppy to stay at the Bunker, but as James couldn’t stand Cabell and found it impossible to work around him, Bill had to ask him to leave. Cabell threw a crying fit over the phone but pulled himself together and left. He and Poppy moved into a place above Howard Brookner at 4 Bleecker Street. Bill saw him occasionally but they had definitively broken up and there was no emotional involvement. By now Cabell had become very deeply involved with Poppy and was very dependent on her. His hysteria and craziness persisted, and there were noisy scenes all day long. Brookner reported that he would sometimes hear Cabell screaming curses at Poppy and then find out that Cabell had been alone.

In December Cabell called to say that Poppy needed an abortion and asked Bill for money. Burroughs expressed a certain amount of skepticism since he knew that Cabell was hustling for junk but told him to come over to the Bunker. “When he came in the door it was just something awful, his face was a thing to see, it was sort of peeled, I’ve never seen a more horrible expression on anyone’s face. I wish I’d had a hidden camera to take that face. The hate in that face was something. You had to step back from it, it was so awful.”

Cabell said, “I see you don’t believe in her pregnancy, you don’t care anything about her pain.”

Bill replied, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I understand that there’s pain involved.” He gave him fifty dollars. Cabell grabbed the money and said, “There’s something for you to read, you won’t like it, but it’s the truth.” It was a ten-page rant that he had clearly spent all night composing, “so full of sick hate” that Bill couldn’t read it all. He skipped about in it, then destroyed it. “It was unbelievable, it made you physically sick to read it. Of course a hysteric’s hate is very disconcerting because there’s no limits on their hate, it just concentrates. It’s always very frightening to encounter that hate.”3 Most of the letter was directed against James, who had become an obsession with Cabell because he felt that he should be occupying James’s place. He told Bill, “Don’t you realize that James is just waiting around for you to die?”

The day after Christmas, a week after the letter, James fell off his bicycle and broke his jaw. It was wired shut for four weeks. To Burroughs this was clearly the result of a curse, the direct result of Cabell’s scream of hatred. He told Ted Morgan, “I was appalled by this outburst of absolutely demonic hate but I didn’t really blame Cabell personally because all hysterics are very subject to possession. They can be possessed by something and you ask them about it later they don’t even remember it, and this was an obvious demonic possession by something that had come in and taken over Cabell Hardy completely.” As soon as Bill heard what happened he asked John Giorno, “Please do not invite Cabell to your New Year party.” Burroughs could hear Cabell saying, “I hope you choke on it.” And it turned out that someone did. It was Carl Laszlo, whom Bill and Brion had stayed with in Basel, who was visiting New York.

A roll call of Beat Generation and downtown luminaries had gathered at John’s loft for New Year dinner: Allen Ginsberg; Anne Waldman; Udo Breger; Carl Laszlo and his two boyfriends, both called Michael; Herbert Huncke; Louis Cartwright; Lucien Carr; Victor Bockris; and Stewart Meyer. The party began in the afternoon when John Giorno, Stew Meyer, and Bill had tea and hashish brownies that Bill had cooked.

Stew Meyer: “Tastes like shit, Bill. What’re these things?”

WSB: “Raisins.”

Stew Meyer: “Tastes like shit with flies in it.”

The brownies were as dry as sandpaper. Bill and John washed them down with vodka and tonic, then they all did a little heroin to hold them for the time it took for the ingested pot to kick in. Bill gave one of his discourses on animals. First he explained that the bedbug is the best hunter on the face of the earth because hunger does not force it to make dangerous moves. It will stay in suspended animation for years if necessary before a suitable meal comes along. Then he praised the “incomparable wolverine! which can shred a man to the bone in nine blood-splattering seconds.” At six o’clock they moved up to John’s loft and the guests began to arrive. Bill began to drink and smoke joints. Dinner was served. Carl began to choke; he went blue in the face, his eyes bulging. One of the Michaels screamed in German, “Do something!” but no one knew what to do. Anne Waldman began praying. The others looked on, aghast. Louis Cartwright attempted the Heimlich maneuver. He reached his arms around Carl from behind and roughly pushed up on his diaphragm, but it didn’t work. Carl looked half dead. Bill got a knife and was preparing to execute an emergency tracheotomy to allow him to breathe when one of the Michaels took over from Louis and executed a perfect abdominal thrust, clearing the steak. Carl stood there trembling, his cigar still in hand. He had shat his pants, so Bill and Stew took him down to the Bunker to clean up and find him some new ones. Bill commented, “I know curses and I know how they work. It was directed at me and it bounced off and hit poor Carl Laszlo, a curse is a very real thing.”4 Bill finished the evening with a speedball (heroin and cocaine). He continued to see Cabell from time to time and they both acted as if the letter had never been written, but Burroughs had been impressed. “The smallest men throw the heaviest curses, and a curse from Cabell Hardy, that is a curse. It’s a curse from a small evil man.”

Cabell began to burn down the city. He stung a lot of his friends for money for heroin, he bounced checks, he sold heroin that turned out to be baking powder. People began calling Burroughs’s number but he told them that Cabell didn’t live there anymore. They tried to get his address and to bluff him, but Bill explained, “I’m not responsible for this man’s checks. If you’re looking for him, you find him.” When people threatened to go to the police, he said, “Go ahead.” Cabell fled New York.

2. Heroin

The Bunker years were drug years. Virtually everyone Burroughs knew or saw was continually smoking pot, hashish, Thai temple sticks, sniffing or shooting cocaine or heroin or swallowing half-gram balls of opium. They talked endlessly about drugs, comparing the ones they were on now with others taken at other times, remembering spectacular highs and fantasizing about the highs of tomorrow. Burroughs chippied around on his reading tours. One time in Los Angeles, everyone around him was sniffing heroin and he got a light habit. It only took a few days to get him hooked again. After that he went to Toronto for a reading and had to find a doctor to give him some Percodan. He usually traveled with some pinkies⁵—Codethyline Houdé, available over the counter at any pharmacy in France—because he had a horror of catching flu and not having a serious painkiller with him.

New York was awash with heroin. Howard Brookner brought some to the Bunker, as did Stewart Meyer, and fans came bearing gifts. Soon Bill was fully addicted again. Stew had access to a large quantity of opium through a Mafia connection. It was only available by the kilo, and worked out at about four to five dollars a gram. Burroughs took it throughout the spring of 1980 and by June was stabilized on a gram of opium a day plus street heroin that he shot up. Sometimes he would go with Victor Bockris to visit Tom Sullivan, “the Kid,” a famous drug dealer who arrived in New York with a million dollars and was very generous with his high-end cocaine and heroin. He had a place on the Upper East Side and another in the Village. There were lots of cocaine groupie girls around. But Sullivan got into bad shape and the money ran out. He died at the age of twenty-three.

Bill usually scored through someone else or accompanied people like Howard or Stew. The pushers were in tough competition with each other and all had their own drug brands: there was Black Sunday, the Red, and the Black Is Back, all with different logos on the wrap. Bill was flattered that one on Rivington Street was called Dr. Nova. Bill was never involved in a bad incident, but he knew it was inevitable that if he continued he would encounter some unpleasantness. In addition, he never knew what he was getting: sometimes it was talc, other times a barbiturate, sometimes it would be a good count, other times not. There was always the possibility of getting a bad batch. One shipment from Iran killed a number of people in Paris, and several addicts went blind in New York from it. Bill was getting junk from the same source as one boy who lost his sight. Allen Ginsberg was concerned to find that Bill was addicted again, but Bill told him firmly, “Look Allen, I’m writing and living my life.”6 As Burroughs said, there was no question that if James had been living in New York City he would have protested most vigorously. But James was in Kansas. Bill knew that the situation could not continue indefinitely. Stew Meyer described it: “James was away, the mice were playing. Here we were, William, Howard, and I, three dreamy guys. We all got into trouble. James came back and William ended up in Kansas on methadone […] William back in Kansas ’cause he had been a naughty boy. Ever see that look on his face, facetiously apologetic, about as sincere as a syphilitic choirboy.”⁷

Bill needed three bags a day minimum, usually four, estimating that a bag was three-quarters of a grain if you were lucky, and a bag was ten dollars. Many people quickly got on a six-bag-a-day habit, which was prohibitively expensive because at that time in New York there was a lot of cocaine mixed in with the heroin and that tended to make people use more heroin in order to smooth out the coke. Bill couldn’t stand cocaine by itself; he hated the teeth-grinding and the poor coordination and would only take it mixed with heroin, methadone, or opium. He said, “If it had been easy and cheap it would have been okay but it wasn’t. It takes a lot of time so when it was suggested to me that I get on the methadone program I did that.”⁸ He had been stockpiling methadone, bought from Huncke, who was getting a hundred milligrams a day on the program but only using eighty, as a reserve stock in case things got hot and he couldn’t score. Most of Stew’s opium was gone and his connection had changed his name and disappeared, so there was little hope of getting more.

On March 3, 1980, Howard Brookner filmed the only fictional scene in his film about Burroughs. He had arranged to film “The Lavatory Has Been Locked for Six Solid Hours I Think They’re Using It for an Operating Room” in the bathroom of the Bunker, with Bill playing Dr. Benway, Andy Warhol’s transvestite superstar Jackie Curtis playing the nurse, and Stew Meyer playing Dr. Lymph, Dr. Benway’s appalled assistant. Jackie Curtis couldn’t decide which tits to wear and in the end decided that she was female enough already. Bill immersed himself in his role, growling and cursing in his white medic’s coat, splashing stage blood all over himself and the crew.

Bill’s friend Ira Jaffe worked at a methadone maintenance clinic and convinced Bill that being on junk in New York City was not a long-term option. In September 1980 Ira arranged for Burroughs to be treated by Dr. Littleson, who ran the Einstein Medical School clinic way out in the Bronx. Bill would go to her house and she would take him to the clinic. Afterward she was usually able to find someone to drop him at the subway to return to the city, which took about forty-five minutes. Bill liked her but the strain of all that traveling each day was too much for him, so after about ten days she enrolled him in a special celebrity program at 27 East 92nd Street, near Central Park, run by Dr. Harvey Karkus, where well-known actors and public figures went and appointments were timed so that they didn’t run into each other. They asked if he wanted to join under an assumed name, but he declined. He took one urine test and tested positive for heroin and got on the program. For the first three months Bill had to go up there each day; after that he began getting take-homes. It cost a hundred dollars a week (most clinics were between ten and fifty dollars a week), but that was still cheaper than Bill’s habit. He joined the program more from financial necessity than any real desire to come off. His ambivalence was shown one night at the Bunker, as Stew Meyer recorded:

October 9th 1980

Tonight at the Bunker Uncle Bill proclaims; “Junk Is Beautiful! We have been shat upon long enough! Gather yon junkies into a political block of dedicated members always lookin’ for converts! ‘Here kid, try some’a this.’ Soon we will swell into a national or even international power making big demands on the status quo. Give us our medicine! Give it to us cheap! Strong! Ready for the cooker!” He was all lit up like a television preacher I mean it was hard to doubt the sincerity blasting out of those white devil blue eyes.

Burroughs was to remain on the methadone maintenance program from 1980 until the end of his life in 1997. This meant that all of the books written in the States were created while opiated. Virtually all of Burroughs’s writing was done when he was high on something: The Naked Lunch was written on marijuana and majoun, and much of it was done when he was strung out on Eukodol, despite his many denials. The American books are all heroin and methadone novels. One effect of methadone is to radically suppress the sexual drive: Burroughs wrote a lot about sex in the final trilogy, but experienced it hardly at all. In addition, from the time of his return to the States he was stoned on pot most of the time. He always smoked in order to write. He woke several times in the night and would smoke a joint to get back to sleep. He also smoked full-strength English cigarettes, Senior Service when he could get them, until 1991 when he had a triple heart bypass. Drinking began at 6:00 p.m. He lived to be eighty-three years old.

3. “We Must Hold the Bunker at All Costs”⁹

Burroughs had no long-term relationship during the time he was in New York. He had hoped that James would be his partner, and though they no longer had a sexual relationship, he missed James and was always excited when he announced a forthcoming visit to New York. In the absence of a boyfriend, Bill had established a little family for himself at the Bunker with Stew Meyer, Howard Brookner, Victor Bockris, and John Giorno at the core, and a changing cast of walk-ons and spear carriers. James, however, remained central even though he was now only a visitor. Stewart Meyer, in his journal for January 27, 1981, commented, “James in a great mood and seems entirely at-home in the Bunker. His presence constitutes a household for William. The connection between them is probably the most important human contact in the ol’Doc’s life.”

John Giorno played the same role in Burroughs’s life that Antony Balch had done; he lived in the same building and could be relied upon to have dinner with, for friendship, and for occasional sex. With James in Kansas, Bill needed someone to look after him. James Grauerholz said, “[At this time] John was the person who contributed most to William’s care and upkeep and companionship, and loved him.” Some people complained that John Giorno befriended Burroughs in self-interest; he toured the country with him as his opening act, released him on his Giorno Poetry System records, and basked in his reflected glory. When he released his The Best of William Burroughs boxed set of CDs, Giorno included seven photographs of himself with Burroughs in the booklet but only four of Bill with Allen Ginsberg. Allen felt that John was exploiting Burroughs and capitalizing on his fame, but Burroughs knew that and chose to allow it.

John Giorno and James had very different approaches to Burroughs. For Giorno, Burroughs was like a guru and could do no wrong, even if he was on tour and almost too inebriated to read his work. James remembered, “I would say, ‘William’s too drunk,’ and John would say, ‘Oh, but he’s a great wisdom teacher.’ And he was not the only one; there were other people like Steven Lowe. Their worshipful stance was such that he could do no wrong.” James had a more practical approach. “My point of view was, I admire him, I give him the benefit of the doubt, but he’s only human, he has his limitations, he may not be respecting them. I felt like his wife, like, ‘Don’t embarrass me.’ I was embarrassed for him. He dreaded the readings, at first, then he got into it. The difference with me was that I was just square enough to think, ‘No, he’s drinking too much, not eating enough and he’s ill.’ Some of the readings were a disaster. More than he realized. But he did many great ones.”

John, on the other hand, wrote, “He’d get drunk (vodka and Coca-Cola) and stoned (marijuana) before every performance and then walk out onstage cold grey and focused and give a magnificent performance. Each show was a masterpiece, exhilarating audiences with his clarity.”10 James agreed with Ginsberg that John was a “glamour seeker. […] John Giorno could not ever possibly object to, or be embarrassed by, or deny absolutely capitalizing on William’s fame or anybody else’s fame that he’s ever known in his life to gather more fame and attention for himself. That is an overall Identikit picture of John Giorno. It’s his nature.” But it was usually a positive experience. James recalled, “John contributed a huge amount to William’s performances and those shows. Not only was he a great opener but he was a great travel companion and loads of fun to drink with. A lot of fun and laughs. And he had a real professional attitude towards getting there and setting up. […] I really must say, we really had the most wonderful times.”

Allen was one of Bill’s frequent visitors. Their long friendship had matured to a stage where they would bicker for hours on end like an old married couple. They had deep reserves of love and mutual respect for each other that a few disagreements could not harm. Bill was irritated that Allen was judgmental about his drug taking, alcoholism, and lack of interest in Buddhism. In turn, he thought it was a failing in Allen not to see the value of telepathy, the magical kingdom, and Bill’s other concerns. This sometimes led to a low level of antagonism, but they both seemed very comfortable with it; they were surface disagreements that they had held for years.

Allen’s best work was written in the fifties, his years in San Francisco, New York, and Paris, when he did nothing else but write poetry. In the sixties, much of his writing time was taken up by antiwar and other political activities. He provided many of the ideas and much of the philosophy behind the hippie movement and was a catalyst to the growth of the underground press with his enormous, ever-growing body of contacts. Burroughs was enormously impressed at how much Allen had achieved, but was concerned at how stressed, tired, and exhausted he often appeared. In his years of work at Naropa, teaching and working with assistants and administrators, Allen had neglected his poetry. He wrote a few good short poems, but literally had not the time to do more. Naropa took up thousands of hours of his time over the years.

His teaching had also made him into a teacher; Allen had developed a tendency to pronounce instead of converse. Old friends such as Lucien Carr grew increasingly irritated as Allen lectured them on the CIA, or Buddhism, or whatever his latest preoccupation was, instead of relating to them as friends. His office staff had heard enough of Trungpa’s supposed lineage to be bored at the mere mention of his name. His continuing obsession with sex also became irritating. One time at the Bunker Allen asked Bill how his sex life was going and Bill sighed, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “Oh Allen give it a rest.”11 Allen had felt that Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville had supplanted him in Bill’s affections, but now that Bill was back in New York, Allen was able to resume his senior role once again and Bill regarded him as his closest friend. Allen rarely got really high, but one evening that January he tried some Thai stick and got smashed silly. He kept asking Bill long, complicated questions and then forgetting the subject halfway through. Bill thought this was hilarious and kept asking, “What was the question again, Allen?”

In the mornings Bill would seat himself at his desk in his banker’s chair and set to work. Above him was one of Brion Gysin’s Moroccan street scenes, one of the few decorations in the vast empty white space. The concrete floor and ceiling amplified the buzzing from the refrigerator, the radiators gurgled and sometimes emitted a cough of steam, the room resounded with the machine-gun rattle as Burroughs pounded the keys of his large upright manual Olympia. Sometimes John Giorno or Stew Meyer would stop by in the afternoon, but Burroughs usually put in a good day’s work. He could no longer afford to eat out all the time, but there was rarely a need to because John Giorno cooked for him much of the time, or one of the family would organize a dinner party at the Bunker for five or six people. With the exception of the celebrities brought over by Victor Bockris to provide fodder for his book, Burroughs rarely saw anyone outside of his small circle of friends.

In addition to arranging readings for Bill and dealing with the endless requests for interviews, meetings, and reprint rights, much of James’s time was taken up with family problems. In January 1980 his father had a complete nervous breakdown and spent nine months in the psychiatric ward of the VA hospital in Topeka. James had to wrap up his father’s law business and pay off huge debts, including contested loans from two estates he managed. Meanwhile in January Burroughs attended the “Freud and the Unconscious” conference in Milan and the next month flew off to Brussels for a two-week European reading tour. April saw Bill and James in Los Angeles, visiting the set of John Byrum’s Heart Beat film about Kerouac and Cassady. They were treated very well, stayed at the Tropicana, had a car at their disposal and all the reefer they wanted. Afterward Bill went to spend two days with Steven Lowe in New Mexico, but it rained the whole time so he had no chance to do any shooting.

In May, Bill made a short trip to Paris, and in July he was a speaker at the three-day “D. H. Lawrence: His Influence on Living and Writing Today” conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Allen Ginsberg, Margaret Drabble, Robert Duncan, Stephen Spender, and others. In fact he got to say very little because Leslie Fiedler dominated the proceedings and no one else could get a word in edgewise. Burroughs remembered, “Finally it got so bad that I wanted to say something and Leslie Fiedler keeps talking on and on, and Allen Ginsberg said, ‘Will you shut up? William wants to say something!’ And I did. I pointed out that I had indeed been influenced very much by Lawrence’s book on Mexico, and what I had written about Mexico and various other remarks like that.”12 Spender had changed his attitude toward Burroughs since their altercation at the Edinburgh Literary Conference in 1962 and was “sweet as pie,” as Burroughs said. Afterward there was a big reception in Taos at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s adobe mansion. Burroughs stopped briefly in New York on his way to a reading in Rome. His last big trip that year was in December to the south of France, where he took part in a four-day conference called “Man, Earth and the Challenges” at the Institute of Ecotechnics, in Les Marronniers, Aix-en-Provence. In Paris he stayed with Howard Brookner and spent a lot of time with Brion. He was home in the Bunker for Christmas after an exhausting year.

There were six hundred pages of material left over from Cities of the Red Night, even after some of it was thrown away. A lot of it went into the next book, The Place of Dead Roads. Burroughs had a dream in which a Mexican was patiently trying to explain to a gringo, “These aren’t unused roads, they are dead roads.” The new book was a lot easier to write because it was straight narrative. The western material from Cities of the Red Night acted as a springboard. Denton Welch was another major influence that led to the character of Kim Carsons. Burroughs explained, “The whole style of the book, the whole style of his speech, is pure Denton Welch. I could pass off whole sections of that as an undiscovered manuscript by Denton Welch and everyone would say it’s true.”¹³ He went on: “The voice, to the extent that it’s Denton Welch, it isn’t a question of admiring it, it’s a question of it being suitable for a certain character.”14

Billy continued to hover in Bill’s consciousness as a nagging unsolved problem. At the end of 1980, Teina, an old girlfriend of Billy’s from the Green Valley School, wrote and invited Billy down to Florida from Denver. She was newly divorced, wealthy, and had harbored a crush on him ever since they were at school, but had no idea what a terrible state he was in. Burroughs wrote, “We thought maybe she would really look after him, and with her money it would work out. She was picturing him as the person she remembered, this healthy person, this totally different person. Before he was drinking. She must have gotten a terrible shock.”¹⁵ James did try to warn her, but no one could have expected such a deterioration in someone so young. It didn’t work out, but she did not abandon him; she put him up in one of the empty apartments that she owned. Meanwhile he had a big falling-out with George Van Hilsheimer, who ran the Green Valley School, over a small incident; Billy got completely drunk on malt liquor and passed out by a creek, where he was picked up by the police and finished up in West Volusia County Hospital in DeLand, Florida.

Over the years Billy Jr.’s health had deteriorated further. He was in pain much of the time. He and Bill frequently spoke on the phone and exchanged correspondence, but his decline seemed to be inexorable. There were a few occasions when Bill and Billy did readings together, but Billy Jr. had terrible stage fright. Allen gave him twenty-five dollars as a teaching fee for talking to a class at Naropa, though it almost certainly came from his own pocket. Billy once made good money doing a radio documentary on his father, but he was basically unemployable and when he did get a job he never held it for long. He drank a lot and was unpredictable, selfish, and difficult to be with. He was on Social Services but he was very negligent about going to collect his checks and going through the bureaucracy needed to get the money. As soon as he got money he would give it away or spend it. Bill sent him $150 a month, which was enough for him to live on. If he sent any more, Billy would only give it away; sometimes he gave everything away and had no money for food. Bill was uncritical; he had never been much good at holding down a job himself. It obviously wasn’t going to work out with Teina, so Bill paid for Billy to rent a room in DeLand. Ten days later Billy called one of the social workers at West Volusia County Hospital, saying, “You’d better get over here, I’m really sick.” The man went over, looked at him, and called an ambulance. Billy died six hours later on the morning of March 3, 1981. James received the telephone call at the Bunker and told Bill at breakfast. Bill rose and went to his room, where he sobbed uncontrollably for half an hour.16

The cause of death was given as a heart attack. There was an autopsy but Bill never learned of its results. Bill did not go to Florida. He attended a short ceremony at Trungpa’s center in New York, conducted by one of the Tibetans. Bill was happy that Billy had been given five additional years, though Billy himself may have preferred otherwise. He began dreaming about Billy. Allen salvaged Billy’s papers that were still in Boulder and forwarded them. Burroughs said, “He left these papers, obviously meant for me to see. There’s a curse delivered against me, which he never sent. This outpouring of hatred. But the essential thing is that he made me responsible for every thing that ever happened to him. […] On and on, it was quite insane. But it’s that thing that Billy had, of making someone else completely responsible for everything they do.”¹⁷

Karen, Billy’s former wife, was given his ashes, but she disliked Burroughs, whom she blamed for all Billy’s problems, and refused to send them on to him. Allen Ginsberg intervened. “She had nothing against me. So I sent a very simple letter saying I would take care of it. Bill had no specific intention with the ashes, so I suggested that we should just bury them there [Boulder]. So he said fine, so I said I’d take care of it.”¹⁸ She sent the ashes to him. Allen arranged a small ceremony at Naropa and then the ashes were buried on the back hill approach to Marpa Point, on land owned by Karmê Chöling outside Boulder.

Burroughs could never fully understand why Billy blamed him for everything. He recognized that he had been a terrible father and neglected his son. He had not shown him the love he so desperately wanted and had been unable to mend the relationship in Boulder during the only sustained time they spent together. But Burroughs refused to accept that by killing the boy’s mother he had destroyed Billy’s life. He did not understand why Billy felt that he was responsible for his distress, for the drinking and drug taking that eventually led to his death. Bill’s immediate reaction to Billy’s death was to start going over to Rivington Street himself to score for heroin, despite being on methadone. After a busy schedule of readings to promote Cities of the Red Night, Bill went to Lawrence in June to spend a month with James to sort out his feelings about Billy and recover. James wrote to Julie, Billy’s half sister, to inform her of his death, but received no reply.

Meanwhile, Burroughs’s profile was slowly increasing in the United States, the result of all the celebrity pieces written by Victor Bockris and others, and the ceaseless touring America from coast to coast to promote Cities of the Red Night with readings and book signings. The culmination of all this activity was an appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, the coolest television show on the air, home to writers such as Terry Southern and performers like John Belushi. The writers’ wing of the show was famously awash with hash and cocaine, and the show itself was peppered with drug-taking in-jokes. Burroughs appeared in a six-minute segment on November 7, 1981. He was introduced by actress and model Lauren Hutton, who said, “I’m very pleased tonight to introduce a man who in my opinion is the greatest living writer in America. Reading selections from Naked Lunch and Nova Express in his first television appearance ever, here is Mr. William Burroughs!”19 Saturday Night Live musical director Hal Willner added a subtle soundtrack of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to Burroughs’s reading from “Dr. Benway,” to great effect. There was no mention of the Beat Generation. His appearance on Saturday Night Live helped him to throw off this tag and appear as an absolutely unique voice in American letters.