Chapter Fifty-One

His thoughts were becoming uncontrollable. To stop their unbearable flow he told himself stories in pictures.

—DENTON WELCH¹

Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defense against the enemy.

—PICASSO, LES LETTRES FRANÇAISES, 1943

1. Painting

In Lawrence, Kansas, Mayor Mike Amyx proclaimed the week of September 7–13, 1987, to be “River City Reunion Week,” a celebration of the work of the myriad creative people who have intersected with the City of Lawrence, organized by James Grauerholz, Bill Rich, and George Wedge from the university English department. It was a major event, featuring Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Edie Kerouac Parker, Michael McClure, Keith Haring, Ed Dorn, Jello Biafra, Andrei Codrescu, John Giorno, Jim Carroll, and Ed Sanders. Local poets Ken Irby, George Kimball, David Ohle, Jim McCrary, and Wayne Propst read, among a cast of dozens. Towers Open Fire, Chappaqua, Pull My Daisy, and This Song for Jack were screened; Marianne Faithfull performed on Thursday night and Hüsker Dü on Sunday evening. The actual daytime sessions concluded with Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl.” As James Grauerholz wrote, “For a week, Lawrence was the national headquarters of the counter culture.”²

After completing The Western Lands, Burroughs concentrated more on painting than on writing. At the end of 1986 he rented a studio housed in a dilapidated barbed-wire factory on the Kaw River waterfront to paint in and to write. Diego Cortez contacted Burroughs and arranged to visit him with the artist Philip Taaffe, in order to work on a catalog text for Taaffe’s show at the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York. They arrived on January 31, 1987, and James made appropriate arrangements for Burroughs and Taaffe to work together: ropes and ladders, sheets of plywood, half-filled gallon cans of colored house paint, and old tubes of acrylic. They piled everything into a pickup and headed to an empty cornfield outside the city limits where they could shoot. In the distance there were passing freight trains. They hung the plywood from the ladder by ropes and hung the cans of paint from another ladder, using hemp twine. They stapled tubes of paint to the plywood and experimented with shooting at them from various distances—too close and the painting would be destroyed, too far and the shot would be ineffective in exploding the paint. Taaffe brought with him some cans of spray paint, something Bill had not previously encountered. “We strung this can—red paint—in front of a piece of wood and shot it up. It exploded beautifully. Perfect. I didn’t have to do anything to it.”3 He called the result The Red Skull. Spray cans worked in a more satisfactory manner than the paint cans.

The next day the two of them did a drawing collaboration in Bill’s factory studio in Lawrence after buying a quantity of oak tag paper, paints, inks, and brushes.⁴ Their discussion was taped and was published as “Drawing Dialogue” in the catalog to Taaffe’s show. Taaffe liked Bill’s work sufficiently to suggest that he should exhibit it, and back in New York, Diego Cortez contacted the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, which expressed interest. Burroughs did not start to do work on paper until after Brion’s death. “It would have been unthinkable for me to compete with him. I’ve done a lot better than he did, financially, on painting. Yes, that’s one thing, collaborating was one thing [on writing], but as soon as I started painting that would be a matter of competition.”⁵ Brion would certainly have seen it that way, without question.

Burroughs had no formal art training, but felt that maybe that was a good thing given his way of approaching his art. “There might be something on my mind, I try to just let the hand do it, to see with my hand. And then look at it, see what has happened. I may see quite clearly in there something that I’ve seen recently in a magazine or a newspaper, whatever, emerging. I can’t consciously draw anything. I can’t draw a recognizable chair—it looks like a four-year-old’s.” The initial “killing of the canvas,” making random marks to overcome the tyranny of the white rectangle, provided the subject matter; in among the whorls of paint, a subject emerged. “I don’t know what I’m painting until I see it. In fact I’ve done a lot with my eyes closed.” This is similar to de Kooning’s letter paintings where he would scrawl a series of letters on the canvas, just to give himself something to work with. The point was to get started. He soon began to use stencils, at first commercial design forms, then ones that he cut himself from cardboard, which he combined with collage elements.

It was the “surprised recognition” that Burroughs was after. “It applies to any art form. That’s what I try to do in painting. Klee said a painter strives to create something that has an existence apart from him and which could endanger him. Now the most clear proof of something being separate is if it can harm you. […] I do think all writers, many other writers and painters are trying to create something that has an existence apart from themselves. It would literally step out of the picture or the book. So all artists are trying to achieve what some people would say is impossible, that is to create life. Of course, impossible is a meaningless word to me.”6 This fits in with cut-up theory: the recognition of connections between phrases suggested by random process; with his occult experiments with crystal balls; with the random cut-ins on his tape experiments; and now the emerging images from random visual events. “That what it’s all about. The way that clear representational objects will emerge from what would seem to be a random procedure. I once took a small notebook and put some red gouache on here and on there—it’s an inkblot technique. I looked and there was a perfectly clear red pig, a wild pig, tusks, bristles, and everything.”⁷

His first one-man show opened at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery at 163 Mercer Street in New York on December 19, 1987. In the catalog Burroughs wrote:

I am trying to get pictures to move.

It almost happens: a face comes into almost-miraculously close focus, almost smiles, snarls, speaks… Then back to the picture, there on the paper, the wood.

Well, I think, look outside at the trees and leaves in front of the bedroom window. They move in the wind. The same thing is happening. I see faces, scenes. […]

“Well,” says the critic, “so you can see faces and scenes in the clouds. This is infantile.”

Perhaps. And as often the child sees more clearly than the adult, who has already decided what he will see and what he will not see.⁸

Burroughs began painting or spray-painting around cut-out shapes, using commercial stencils of trees, dinosaurs, cats, and faces to “randomize” his canvases, “a randomized selection of objects which however are quite recognizable. Start with your stencils then randomize them, gives you a number of different possibilities.”⁹ He used found objects like metal grilles or perforated metal sheeting as masks, to create a depth of picture plane, then sometimes cut into it with a collage element. His concern was to see what the painting had revealed; he saw the paintings as a gateway to the realm of the unconscious and the imagination. He was looking for figurative elements; he was able to identify faces and people in the paint, “some absolutely recognizable as portraits of certain people.” If he particularly liked one of the faces that emerged, he sometimes had it photographed so he could use it again. The photographer would have to see the face before they could photograph it, because Burroughs was very specific about which bits of the painting he wanted. He might use a face from a red picture in another red picture, or make collages of a number of pictures, or all possible combinations. There was a big failure rate; very often nothing emerged. Whereas Picasso was using art as a form of negotiation between the real world and himself as an individual, Burroughs was using it to penetrate deeper into himself.10

Burroughs was essentially producing abstract paintings, but they were not cut off from recognizable objects: collage elements, photographs, stencils of animals all referred back to the real world, even the abstract shapes themselves. As Picasso pointed out in 1934, a common term for abstract work used to be “nonfiguration,” but there can be no such thing as nonfiguration. “All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms, well then think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.”¹¹ Burroughs’s work is a meditation on the state of his mind; like the photo collages of 1963–65, they are a cubist assemblage of memories, personal references, and ideas suggested by random gestures and events, and are a snapshot of that moment of time.

Though there was no direct influence of Niki de Saint Phalle’s work on Burroughs’s art, it is nonetheless the Nouveaux Réalistes with whom he has the most affinity: Arman, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, César, Daniel Spoerri, and others, as well as the Ultra-Lettrists, including François Dufrêne. Burroughs shared with them notions of appropriation, collage, and particularly décollage techniques: the Nouveaux Réalistes slashed or lacerated billboards, revealing deeper layers from the posters beneath, much in the same way that the blast from Burroughs’s weapons exposed the deeper layers of his plywood panels. Burroughs had rarely visited art galleries and was not familiar with contemporary art theory, which did not interest him, but he recognized that he and Yves Klein had much in common, in particular Klein’s use of random events to create the image. On October 21, 1988, Burroughs had a show at the Paul Klein Gallery in Chicago, an event that gave rise to one of his synchronous experiences. “I had an odd thing happen. I’d just written down on the typewriter or in pencil, ‘Yves Klein set his pictures on fire’ (and put them out at some point. I did quite a lot of experiments like that, and also tracing outlines with gunpowder, so on and so forth). And James came here to tell me that the Paul Klein gallery had burned down in Chicago.”12 A whole block of galleries and stored pictures burned down. All of Burroughs’s pictures from the show were destroyed. He collected the insurance, but it was a real disaster. “That’s an interesting little juxtaposition.”¹³

Many of the early paintings were executed in India ink on card, which dried in a few minutes. He had some interesting results using what he called Rorschach monoprints—taking impressions of an image by painting one piece of slick coated card and pressing another one against it and rotating it a little. “I try my best to make my mind a blank. […] The whole idea is that I try to let my hands go and paint whatever my so-called unconscious mind is aware of.”¹⁴ He also used watercolors, the medium he used in 1959 when he was first under the influence of Gysin. He began to see pictures in his dreams and sometimes dreamed that he was painting. “I’ll dream about it and then I’ll see things in the pictures from dreams. You’ve got a feedback. It’s the same way with life. There’s a feedback between dreams and writing in dreams and painting.” In this way, his painting helped his writing. “To some extent I stopped [writing] when I completed my trilogy. I find I paint a while and then I get ideas for writing. […] Sometimes they turn out quite differently to what I have in mind. I paint intuitively. I can’t draw, but it’s probably quite simple. I’m carrying on the same ideas in writing and painting.”¹⁵

At first, Bill and James took virtually every exhibition opportunity that was offered. They wanted to show the work, and to sell it. In 1988, after the Shafrazi show, came shows at the Suzanne Biederberg gallery in Amsterdam and a show at the October Gallery in London—both shows shared a catalog. There were shows at the Western Front Gallery in Vancouver, the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, the Gallery Casa Sin Nombre in Santa Fe, the Paul Klein Gallery in Chicago, and a group show in New York. In 1989 there were shows in Cologne, Montreal—where Galerie Oboro issued two limited-edition prints—Toronto, Basel, Rome, Lisbon, and St. Louis. Few modern artists could keep up such a pace, but Burroughs had produced a lot of work and there was enough good material to go around. The art boom was still going and Burroughs began to make good money as an artist. All along, in interviews, he was anxious to express his enormous debt to Brion Gysin, who showed him how to paint. “I didn’t show my work until Brion died because he was touchy and I didn’t want to intrude on him in that way. He was a neglected painter, and understandably that was a sensitive point with him. He was a very great painter, though, and while I’ve been more financially successful, I could never compete with him in terms of the quality of my work.”16

Burroughs also continued his film career. He was in Robert Frank’s 1981 Energy and How to Get It, a documentary about inventor Robert “Lightning Bob” Golka, who received money from the Carter administration to develop cold fusion energy. Bill plays the villainous Energy Czar, wandering around smoking a joint, muttering lines like, “He knows too much, we better shut him down.” In Twister, the 1989 comedy about a Kansas family after a tornado strike, he played an unnamed old geezer doing target practice in his barn. The family are looking for “Jim,” but Bill tells them, “Jim got kicked in the head by a horse last year. [He] went around killing horses for a while, until he ate the insides of a clock and he died” (a line remembered from John Millington Synge’s 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World). That same year he had his best role of all, as the old junkie priest in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy.

Bill and James had known Gus Van Sant ever since he made an award-winning nine-minute 16-millimeter student film called The Discipline of D.E. (1977), based on Burroughs’s eponymous text. Van Sant had recently left the Rhode Island School of Design and was writing, painting, filmmaking, and making music. “Burroughs has been one of my literary influences. I’m pretty sure that you would never be able to tell this. But at one time I was very much under his influence, sometime when I was in college in the early seventies. […] Partly because of his experimental take on literature, and his faith in the written word’s ability to infect or take over the reader when he isn’t aware of it.”¹⁷ After that he made a record called William S. Burroughs: The Elvis of Letters, consisting of four songs that Gus wrote and played on guitar. One of them, “Millions of Images,” a collage of sound bites of Burroughs reading, was taken up by various fans and turned into short films posted on the Web.

For Drugstore Cowboy, Van Sant had originally wanted Burroughs to play the part of Bob Hughes, the slightly older junkie, leader of a gang of four drug addicts who roam the country in the early seventies, supporting their habit by robbing hospitals and pharmacies. In late 1988, Bill and James went to Portland, Oregon, and Bill did a reading for the part that went very well. Burroughs wasn’t sure that he could handle a lead role, and he and James came up with the idea of Bill developing another of the characters, Tom, into a junkie priest, based on Burroughs’s story “The Priest They Called Him.” Gus loved the idea and said he would rewrite the part. Unfortunately he was very busy with production issues and his new script didn’t really cut it. Van Sant said, “He didn’t want to play the character Tom the way he was originally written in the screenplay, which was as this sort of pathetic loser… he wanted the character to have some more pride. So he came up with the idea of making Tom be a junkie priest. So he pretty much created the stuff in his scenes on his own.”18 James asked if they could work on it and Gus agreed. James rewrote the four priest scenes and Bill then added his own imprimatur to them. James remains proud to be the author of the line, “Drugs have been systematically scapegoated and demonized in this country,” that Burroughs delivers with such emphasis. The studio was aghast and wanted to cut Bill out of the movie entirely. Gus Van Sant said, “We had to fight for him. That’s probably the biggest fight I’ve ever had, […] smaller companies can be just as fierce as their studio counterparts.”¹⁹ Matt Dillon took the lead role as Bob Hughes, and Bill played Tom, the priest, to great acclaim. Gus Van Sant was also the director of Burroughs’s most successful short, A Thanksgiving Prayer (1990), taken from Tornado Alley, in which he used montages over a film of Burroughs reading the text.

2. Last Boy

Burroughs had sex with no more than half a dozen people between 1974 and 1997, and he was never able to find someone to replace Ian. When he toured the country doing readings there were sometimes opportunities to pick up boys, and in San Francisco he did find a temporary partner. In New York he mostly had sex with Allen Ginsberg’s friends. Raymond Foye said, “William only wanted to be fucked, it was wham, whirr, thankyou sir—no kissing, no touching, he just lay down and used a popper, but afterwards he was all sentimental and gushy, like a 14-year-old girl.”²⁰ Bill’s relationship with Cabell Hardy had never been very satisfactory, though it meant a lot to Cabell, who was very sensitive, despite his unfortunate personality. He wrote a good deal about his relationship with Burroughs, as did Mark Ewert, who described it in great detail, leaving nothing to the imagination.

In 1988, a teenager named Mark Ewert flew across country to the Naropa Institute with the specific purpose of having sex with Burroughs and Ginsberg. “By sleeping with them, I would join my life to theirs, thereby speeding up my own ascent into personal and artistic greatness. Burroughs wasn’t at Naropa that year, so I made my play for Allen, and that worked out great.”²¹ Allen told him, “It would be great to get Bill laid. He loves to get fucked. And you genuinely care about him and his work.”22 But it was not until September of 1989 that Ewert and Burroughs met. Bill was in town, staying at the Bunker, and Allen called Ewert to ask if he still wanted to meet Burroughs. Ewert said yes, so Allen arranged for him to be his date at the dinner party John Giorno was giving for Bill. There were a dozen guests, all male, all considerably older than him. Mark was seated next to Burroughs. The big hit of the dinner was a Freddy Krueger glove, brought along to show them by Chris Stein of Blondie. It was made from soft gray leather and each finger had a heavy curved blade attached. It had cost him $5,000. Everyone took turns wearing it and swishing it about. Bill said how impractical it was; nonetheless he hogged it, dancing around, demonstrating a series of feints and thrusts for Mark’s benefit. Everyone backed away, partly to give the two of them space, and partly for their own safety. Ewert wrote, “William spent what was for me an uncomfortably long time stalking me around the room, slashing me with the glove, and making ‘growr, growr’ noises. His gaze was steely fixed on mine, and for a moment I was honestly afraid that he would attack me for real if I flinched or looked away: ‘Don’t let him see your fear.’ William’s jungle-hunt of me seemed like such a bad metaphor for exactly what it was—a carnal pursuit—that I was embarrassed for the both of us, but on the other hand, I was totally thrilled. Wasn’t everything proceeding exactly like I had planned?”²³

The next day at Allen’s, Mark eagerly awaited Bill’s verdict. When Allen telephoned him, James answered, and told Allen that Bill had said, “Boy, Allen’s got himself a real beauty this time, hasn’t he?” Allen, the old procurer, spoke to Bill and told Mark, “I made appointment for you, to go over there, at two. James and John and everyone will be gone by then, so you two should have the place to yourselves.” Mark was eighteen, Bill was seventy-five. Bill was awkward and was clearly a little scared. Mark wrote candidly about his seduction:

Lastly, William commits himself to the irrevocable act of actually putting his hand on my knee, and still I do not freak out—indeed, I in turn put my hand on his knee. I give it a little squeeze, and when I feel how bony and frail his leg is, underneath the stiff fabric of his jeans, I’m suddenly awash with a wave of tender protectiveness for this brave little guy, who’s gone through such an ordeal just for a simple sign of affection. Manfully, I throw my arm around his shoulder, and pull William towards me. Both of us sag with relief. William and I didn’t fuck, kiss, or blow one another, which was fine with me, and was certainly a nice change of pace from Allen. […] I couldn’t get over how similar our bodies were: both of us white, hairless, smooth—the same height, the same weight, the same build. The inescapable conclusion was that I was in bed with another boy, and the idea was unbelievably sexy. I had never been in bed with another boy before, and here was my perfect double: a lean, taut body that I could grip with a real hunger, which would be returned.24

Two weeks later, Mark received a postcard inviting him to spend the weekend with Bill in Lawrence. “I can offer you simple, country pleasures, shooting, fishing, canoeing.” He came to stay, and Bill’s support crew stayed well away, even postponing the lawn mowing. Bill later wrote in his journal, “Mark Ewert left yesterday after a three-day visit. I feel now very much merged together. His face emerged quite clearly in a painting I did the last day he was here. He is an extraordinarily sweet and beneficent presence.”²⁵ Friends say that Bill was obsessed with him. The fact was, Bill enjoyed the attention, but he was a junkie and had little in the way of sex drive.

3. Opera

The success of his art career meant that Burroughs could cut down on his readings. Between 1974 and 1988 he had read all over the United States and Canada, he’d read in Amsterdam six times, as well as Berlin, Brussels, London, Helsinki, Basel, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Rome, and other major European cities. In the spring and fall of 1981 they toured Cities of the Red Night with Laurie Anderson and John Giorno. Laurie was brilliant and added a great deal to the show. In San Francisco they oversold the theater and had to add another show. Burroughs liked her a lot. Grauerholz says, “They had a natural kinship, he was very fond of Laurie.” Burroughs appeared in Home of the Brave (1986) and sang “Sharkey’s Night” in his shaky voice on her album Mister Heartbreak (1984). The longest tour had been of Scandinavia in 1983 at the age of sixty-nine. At the university in Tampere, Finland, he performed on a thrust stage to a standing audience. He read well and received tremendous applause. He gathered his papers, turned to his right to walk to the wings, but, blinded by the stage lights, he walked right off the lip of the stage, at least a five-foot rise. In a split second he realized what had happened and somehow managed to crouch and land on his feet like a cat. James grabbed him before his knees buckled.

As if a new career in painting were not enough, seventy-five-year-old Burroughs now got involved with an opera. Several years before, Howard Brookner had introduced Burroughs to Robert Wilson, and now in 1989, Wilson approached Burroughs to collaborate on an opera called The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, based on the German folktale Der Freischütz (The Marksman),²⁶ to be performed in Germany. It is the story of the devil’s bargain, which is always a fool’s bargain. It was perfect for Burroughs.

A file clerk is in love with a huntsman’s daughter, but to obtain her father’s permission to marry, the clerk has to prove his worth as a hunter, for the hunter was getting old and wanted to maintain his legacy. But the clerk is a lousy shot and only brings back a vulture. On his next trip to the forest the devil—Pegleg—appears to him and offers him a handful of magic bullets. With these bullets he hits anything he aims at, but the devil warns him that “some of these bullets are for thee and some are for me.” As his wedding approaches the clerk begins to get nervous, as there is to be a shooting contest and he needs more bullets. He goes to the crossroads and the devil gives him one more magic bullet. At the contest he aims at a wooden dove, but the bullet circles the assembled guests and strikes his betrothed and kills her. The clerk goes mad and joins the devil’s previous victims in the Devil’s Carnival.

Burroughs wrote the libretto, based on Thomas De Quincey’s version of the tale, initially using rhyming couplets even though he knew they would be lost when it was translated into German (this material was never used); singer Tom Waits wrote the songs, which remained in English; and Robert Wilson directed and stage designed the entire performance. The plot has an obvious parallel with Burroughs’s killing of Joan, and he was not shy to reference this in his lyrics for the song “George Schmid”: “Some bullets is special for a single aim. A certain stag, or a certain person. And no matter where you aim, that’s where the bullet will end up. And in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser’s wand, and points where the bullet wants to go.”27 Three of the songs used Burroughs’s lyrics, with music by Tom Waits, and Burroughs himself sang “T’Ain’t No Sin” for the CD version.

In September 1989, Tom Waits, Robert Wilson, and Wolfgang Wiens, dramaturge of the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, spent a week in Lawrence working daily in Bill’s front room with James acting as stenographer and secretary, blocking out The Black Rider. Naturally there were many changes as the words were adapted for performance, and faxes flew back and forth between the theater and Kansas all through the fall and winter of 1989–90 until Wilson was satisfied. Then in February 1990 the team reconvened in Hamburg, all staying at the same hotel with Udo Breger, who was translating Bill’s words into German. Bill’s libretto was then delivered to Wolfgang Wiens, who edited the text further in daily consultation with Wilson during the period of rehearsal and development. Bill attended rehearsals from 7:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m., while Udo and James worked on the translation of the texts. Wilson would invariably have something that he wanted Bill to change, a scene that would have to be rewritten, so Bill would return to the hotel to work on it and then give it to Udo to translate, ready for the next day. They ate most of their meals in the hotel because they had no time to go out.

Before the show opened Bill and James attended the vernissage of his show at the Galerie K in Paris on March 23. It was a great critical success and almost completely sold out, to Bill’s great satisfaction. From there they continued on to Hamburg. The opera opened at the state-owned Thalia Theater on March 31, 1990, and received fifteen standing ovations, lasting exactly twenty-three minutes—close to the record for the theater, and also Bill’s magic number. “Wasn’t that great?” Burroughs asked filmmaker Klaus Maeck. “The devil’s bargain is a classic, and in so many forms—in Hollywood, advertising, job ads—selling your soul, your integrity for games or money or for time. The ultimate form is for time, for immortality.”28 The Black Rider received a good critical reception. Jackie Wullschlager enthused in the Financial Times, “For three hours of graceful, cold artifice, [the actors] look, act, and sound like figures from silent movies. […] Wilson turns children’s drawings into three-dimensional monstrosities. Crooked chairs, two meters high, dangle at odd angles […] pine trees are scissor cut-outs which collapse and grow again like cartoons. […] Waits’ sarcastic ballads, full of folk and blues and rock, call back the scarred idealism and mock simplicity of Kurt Weill, while Burroughs’ monosyllabic banality has here found the setting which makes it seem perfect.”²⁹ The Black Rider was performed in Vienna, Paris, Barcelona, Genoa, Amsterdam, and Berlin and opened for ten performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1993, with later performances in Canada and London, and continues to the present day.

4. Folders

In the course of revising the libretto of The Black Rider, from January to March 1990, Burroughs continued to paint. The opera took up much of his time and the various drafts and rewrites he had to do meant that he was constantly reorganizing his papers in different file folders. He wrote and painted in the same room and, inevitably, one day while painting, he used one of the ochre-colored folders as a palette, mixing his colors on it. Almost immediately, remembering that Paul Klee had remarked that sometimes the way in which the picture is created might be more interesting than the picture itself, he recognized that the folders he had mixed paint on could be seen as paintings in themselves. He began to intentionally create file-folder paintings, painting not only the outsides but the insides as well. As usual, among the swirls of paint, faces and animals emerged. Having decorated many dozens of them, he kept the best as art, and filed his papers in the remainder.

In the spring of 1990, Burroughs was preparing for a major show to be held at Seibu Shibuya Hall in Tokyo, curated by Makito Hayashi and arranged by Mitsuhiro Takemura, who visited Lawrence to make the selection from Burroughs’s work, including the painted folders. Bill’s assistant Steven Lowe described the viewing: “When presented with these painted folders, Mr. Takemura held them in his hands and carefully looked at them. Then he placed them on a low table and arranged them accordion-style, each folder set up on its edges and positioned into the folder next to it. There were fifteen folders, and this elegant grouping became the work entitled ‘Paper Cloud.’ ” It was shown in Tokyo and Sapporo and bought for a private collection.

During that previous winter, Steven Lowe had suggested that Bill might include pages from his novels as part of the collage elements, and also a wider range of objects than he had been using, such as wire, bird feathers, bits of clothing, raw pigment. He suggested that Burroughs sandwich these between sheets of handmade paper and shoot them so that the filling would explode from the back. Many of Burroughs’s works, from the shotgun art to the painted folders, had two sides, not necessarily a front and a back, but in the case of the gun art, an impact side and a result side. The first one of these sandwiched pieces to be shot was done when Mr. Takamura and his party were in Lawrence and they all went to the countryside to shoot guns. During March and June, Burroughs shot nine more of the sandwiched paintings, which became known as the “Thick Pages” series.30 The series could be seen as a collaboration between Burroughs and Lowe.

Many of Burroughs’s shows were organized by José Férez Kuri, a peripatetic art curator from Mexico City who became the director of the October Gallery in London in 1984. In 1988 he gave Burroughs his first show in London—his first abroad—and another there in 1992. He continued to represent Burroughs when he left the October Gallery to become an independent curator in 1991. José divided his time between Lawrence and London and became a close member of the inner circle. He died of a heart attack in 2010, aged fifty-nine, and said, shortly before his death, “I’ve done too many drugs, too much drinking and sex, too much of everything. And I’ve enjoyed it all.” That was why he fitted in so well in Lawrence.

Burroughs had always seen the artworks as a door to the spirit world, an interface to another dimension of memory, psychic experience, and place; like his dreams, his paintings gave him stories. “The paintings write. They tell and foretell stories. Now the pictures are moving, laughing, snarling, talking, screaming, changing, but it is movement in another dimension, not some physical miracle of moving paint.”31 Burroughs’s use of his paintings, and his previous use of Brion Gysin’s paintings for the same purpose—as a port of entry to another world of spirits—removes him somewhat from the general contemporary art world. Burroughs knew little about post-Duchampian art, conceptual art, land art, neorealism, minimalism, and the other movements going on while he was painting, nor did he want to know, often joking about them to interviewers. This does not mean that the work was somehow outside the progression of twentieth-century art history; Burroughs was not producing “outsider” or naïve art; he brought many formal elements of composition to his work and was a good colorist; many of his works are very attractive. They worked both as better-than-most examples of late-twentieth-century painting as well as spirit vehicles for Burroughs’s own private vision.

5. Aliens

Burroughs had read and enjoyed Whitley Strieber’s books Communion and Breakthrough and wanted to meet him. Strieber, the author of successful horror stories and a follower of Gurdjieff, had written a book about his purported abduction by aliens. The book has flying saucers in it but does not speculate how mammalian creatures, wearing the current Earthly fashions—blue overalls—managed to travel to Earth at speeds far in excess of the speed of light, but does suggest that they are possibly Earthly in origin: the dead somehow manifest, visitors from the future, visitors from other levels of consciousness or dimensions, and so on. Burroughs made the obvious connection between the people Strieber experienced and his own possession by the Ugly Spirit and wrote a letter to Strieber saying he would love to contact these visitors. Strieber’s wife, Anne, wrote back saying that they had to be sure that he was who he said he was. “We get a lot of crank letters.” Bill replied saying, “I am indeed really me,” and she wrote back to say, “We, after talking it over, would be glad to invite you to come up to the cabin.” And so in 1990 Burroughs spent the weekend with them, accompanied by Bill Rich. He told Victor Bockris, “I had a number of talks with Strieber about his experiences and I was quite convinced he was telling the truth. […] He told me this. ‘When you experience it, it is very definite, very physical, it’s not vague and it’s not like an hallucination, that they are there.’ ”³² Strieber said that Burroughs was almost overly polite, but very curious about his experiences. In My Education Burroughs wrote, “I was convinced that the aliens, or whatever they are, are a real phenomenon. The abductions, in several accounts, involved sexual contacts. Indeed, that would seem to be their purpose.”33

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