Thursday, August 21, 1975
With Paul Bowles and Ian. Showed them how I could fly. Tried to teach Ian, who was wearing heavy grey lumpy tweed suit. He couldn’t. In plane 30,000 up. They showed me map of landing place. I would fly, they take plane down.
Warm place behind a pine tree.…
—Dream Note from Burroughs’ Retreat Diaries
Ian Sommerville was a young Englishman with whom Burroughs lived and worked for a few years in London in the mid-sixties. He died in a car crash in England on February 5, 1976, a few years after they had separated, on William’s sixty-second birthday. Nobody knows who was driving or what caused the accident.
One evening William asks me to come by at 6:00. He will have to go out at 7:30 with Carl A. to a seance.
“A seance!?”
William has been trying to make contact with Ian and another man called Spence who died violently on Burroughs’ sixty-fifth birthday.
“Yes, Carl knows this medium and I’m trying to get in touch with these two friends of mine.”
Carl comes over. He appears slightly nervous on seeing me until I reassure him that I’m just stopping by for a drink.
The following week Bill visited His Holiness the Dudjom Rinpoche (a Tibetan Buddhist monk) through the auspices of the monk’s social secretary, John Giorno, to seek out the same information. The Dudjom specializes in locating people who have died and informing the interested party as to their well-being.
BURROUGHS: One man was killed by robbers. They called in a rinpoche and he said he couldn’t find him. So then they called the Dudjom and he said, “Well, the trouble is he doesn’t know he’s dead yet. It happened so suddenly.” “Rinpoche” means His Holiness. It’s simply a title. They have a center on the East Side. It’s in a townhouse with several floors; the Dudjom Rinpoche lives there with his two sons, and John stays on the top floor. Another flat on the top floor is now occupied by a visiting lama. John arranges the Dudjom’s appointments and helps take care of his daily needs.
BOCKRIS: Are these attempts to contact dead friends something new?
BURROUGHS: I haven’t attempted it before because I’ve never had any reliable sources. The Dudjom is much more exact in his information than this medium.
BOCKRIS: Do you have any kind of definition of what death is?
BURROUGHS: No. [Impatiently]: Read The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
“There is nothing to fear.”
—Burroughs to Ginsberg, Yage Letters
The subject turns to Hitler’s use of amphetamines. “Well, I dunno,” Burroughs opines, “Hitler was an excellent marksman. He would be walking along and a guy used to say, ‘Throw up a snowball!’ They would throw it up. Hitler hauls out his Walther and blam the snowball goes apart in the air.… One thing for sure, no one on speed could do that.”
Suddenly, in the middle of dinner, Burroughs is walking quietly over to a storage area behind a small walk-in closet. He re-emerges carrying a model of an M-16, walks into the middle of the room some six feet away from the table, and posts himself in a shooting stance. He snaps the gun up to his shoulder, aims at the other end of the loft: “Yep! This is what they use,” he announces in a pallid monotone. And for a split-second I get a close up of William Burroughs that knocks me out of my seat.
“Not many writers can survive being burnt alive like Burroughs has. His consequent irony gives his writing an essential distance. For me, Burroughs writes from a distance beyond death,” says Sylvere Lotringer, professor of French Literature at Columbia University, where Burroughs is taught in French, not English.
One night after a reading, four or five of us accompany William to a bar. In a good mood, he loosens up quickly and starts telling stories. “My Uncle Ivy used to be Hitler’s PR man for the Do Business With Germany campaign in the late thirties. He had many conversations with Hitler and he once said, ‘Hitler told me, “I haven’t got anything against the Jews.”’ Old Ivy died four months after that conversation … of a brainnn tumor, you could feel the fuzziness in his voice.”
When Burroughs returned to New York, he had been out of the States for so long his audience had dwindled, and a lot of people thought that, like Kerouac, he had simply died. Others point out that he seems extremely concerned with death, talking and writing about it all the time. “Intellectually concerned,” agrees Grauerholz, “but not personally. He’s in good health, his teeth are in better condition than mine will be when I’m sixty-two, and he hasn’t put on any weight, as you can see. But yes, the drugs did take a lot out of him; his system has had to pay.”
“I may or may not have ten years,” Burroughs has recently written.
Allen Ginsberg tells this story about a dinner in London in 1973. “One night Burroughs and I went to have dinner with Sonia Orwell and the conversation went on and on in that British manner, you know—light and polite—until I said, ‘Let’s talk about something!’ And Sonia Orwell said, ‘Oh, you know Mr. Ginsberg is so American, always wanting to discuss something serious.’ Burroughs leaned forward and said, ‘Well … let’s discuss something serious. Let’s talk about death.’”
FRIDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 31, 1979
I had been invited for dinner with William and Stewart Meyer by John Giorno. I arrived at the Bunker at 6:30 and proceeded to John’s quarters on the third floor. The others were already there. Vodka and tonics were passed around. William had cooked up a batch of majoun in the afternoon and he, John, and Stewart had all eaten some of it. Stewart suggested that I might like some. Bill said, “Perhaps Victor would prefer to wait until after dinner and have it with his dessert.” John hardly said a word during the dinner because the effect of the majoun was so strong he couldn’t speak. (Majoun is a fudge cooked up with marijuana or hashish in it. Each wafer contains an extremely potent dose.) When you eat a piece of majoun you receive the equivalent effect of smoking twenty joints at the same time.
BOCKRIS: It seems very fitting that we should meet on this night. Do you think it’s going to be a crazy night?
BURROUGHS: Something’s bound to happen in Times Square. There’re always atrocities in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
BOCKRIS: Did you see those three grinning youths who were arrested for stabbing people on the subways? There was a big picture of them today, quite good-looking. Were you patrolling the streets at all today?
BURROUGHS: Yes, I was up at the bank on Union Square. But they’re not going up against a very sympathetic court this time. The sentiment is running high against these young criminals; no matter what their age is, I think they’ll get a good stiff sentence. They’re trying juveniles as adults these days and they can get sent away. They don’t get off with this family-court business anymore. They should have a special tough group for these particular strata of criminal. For attempted robbery with violence we have a minimum of five years and treat ’em right, teach ’em! I’m sure New Year’s Eve in Times Square will take its toll. Let’s have a little bet.
BOCKRIS: We’ll each put up ten dollars.
BURROUGHS: I’ll put up ten.
BOCKRIS: Everyone put ten dollars in the kitty and when the reports come through whoever guesses nearest to the correct number wins the pot, right?
BURROUGHS: I WANT A DEATH!
MEYER: Actually there’ll be a lot of violence possibly without a death.
BOCKRIS: I got forty dollars tonight.
MEYER: We’ll all be checking out the paper tomorrow. Are we actually going to call the police department to discover the number?
BURROUGHS: No, we’ll accept the newspapers. What else can we do. Well, of course [chuckling], if you can scrape up an unreported death …
A few hours later, around 10:30, Udo Breger, who picks up the evening’s story in a report he later sent me, arrived at Giorno’s as I was leaving.
UDO BREGER: It is an exceptionally warm soft winter night when we stroll down the Bowery to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Crossing Prince Street there is Victor already on his way to the next party. All in black. Tight fitting coat. Black woolen cap drawn over his face. Walking stick and little far away eyes. He spins on the spot, bye bye, is off. John Giorno comes downstairs to open up the gate. Soon we’re upstairs and among the first guests of this New Year’s celebration. John’s studio is spacious, a lot of green around, all kinds of plants and small trees. William Burroughs is present, Allen Ginsberg and Fernanda Pivano, his Italian translator from Milan. Angel-eyed Herbert Huncke and Louis Cartwright, Anne Waldman, Lucien Carr and friends. Carl Laszlo and Michael from Basel, accompanied by myself, Soft Need editor Udo Breger. Michael is rather silent and smiles. Carl is very excited about being invited to this party. There are a lot of drinks and a cold buffet. Flashbulbs pop constantly.
It’s just about eleven o’clock. The party is in full swing when everyone suddenly freezes on the spot. Painstruck, Carl has got a piece of meat in the wrong pipe. He can’t breathe and fights it in convulsions. All the guests are struck with terror. If nobody acts right away this man might die.
Louis Cartwright is the first one to act, then Michael instinctively does what’s suggested on posters in the restaurants of Chinatown for “Choking Victims.” He folds his arms tightly around Carl’s waist and pulls back hard. Finally the piece of meat has moved up or down, and this two-minute incident that seemed to last an eternity is over. Carl breathes again and finds some courteous words of excuse.
Carl asks if he could lie down for a while. On the way out to the other apartment downstairs Michael says: “One more minute and I would have cut your throat open to make you breathe.”
Very slowly the conversation picks up again. What kind of curse could it have been that brought Death so close?
Here is a piece of prose, taken from Ah Pook Is Here, that Burroughs often performs at readings:
At this point I put some questions to control. A word about this control. Some years ago in London I contacted two computer programmers who purported to represent something that called itself CONTROL, allegedly from the planet Venus. CONTROL will answer any questions for one dollar. You give your question to the programmers who feed it into a computer some way and out comes the answer. So these are the actual questions that I sent in with my dollars and the answers I got back from CONTROL whoever or whatever CONTROL may or may not be.
QUESTION: If CONTROL’s control is absolute why does CONTROL need to control?
ANSWER: CONTROL NEEDS TIME.
Exactly—CONTROL needs time in which to exercise control just as DEATH needs time in which to kill. If DEATH killed everyone at birth or CONTROL installed electrodes in their brains at birth there would be no time left in which to kill or control.
QUESTION: Is CONTROL controlled by its need to control?
ANSWER: Yes.
QUESTION: Why does CONTROL need “HUMANS” as you call them? (Your knowledge of the local dialects leaves literacy to be desired.)
ANSWER: Wait.
Wait. Time. A landing field. The Mayans understood this very well. Mr. Hart does not. He thinks in terms of losers and winners. He will be a winner. He will take it all.
BREGER: A little while later Carl comes upstairs. He feels a lot better but is still concerned about a scene he might have created. We imagine headlines in the New York papers: “Drugs, Demons and Death at Poets’ Party.” He lights his cigar, the cigar which he had been holding in his hand all the time. Frightening Death away with its cold smell?
Midnight 1980. A new decade. Champagne, I Ching. William throws the coins, three subway tokens. Anne Waldman reads the combination and John Giorno draws the lines. Allen Ginsberg opens the book and reads: “Anagram 12, Stagnation. The worst will happen at this very moment …”
THREE DAYS LATER BILL AND I VISIT ANDY WARHOL AT THE FACTORY
WARHOL: Have you been having more fun in the eighties than you had in the seventies?
BURROUGHS: It’s a little hard to say. We will see. Qui vivra, verra, as the French say, who lives will see.
BOCKRIS: Tell Andy what happened on New Year’s Eve.
BURROUGHS: One of the guests nearly choked to death on a piece of meat. But everyone knew what to do. It’s been publicized so much. It’s supposed to pop right up. They tried that and it wasn’t working, and then one young man with great presence of mind gave him a hug here, and it went down instead of popping out.
WARHOL: How long did this take? Five minutes?
BURROUGHS: Even less than that, three or four minutes. You could be dead in five. Allen Ginsberg was about to call an ambulance. I said there’s no use, there isn’t time. He collapsed onto the couch, saying “Ich sterbe!” I’m dying. He said later that he was trying to tell people to do this but they were doing it already. They knew it wasn’t a heart attack. So when this guy hugged him around the chest he said, “Besser.” I know a man who choked to death on Lobster Newburg.
The following day I visited Bill at the Bunker and told him about a dream Damita had the night before. She was stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver at the Mudd Club. At the hospital she noticed a paper stating that a baby girl had been born to Damita Richter. Under where it said the name of the baby’s father was printed “William Burroughs.” I had been having a lot of psychic experiences with Damita and always found William fascinating on the subject. Although I wasn’t sure how he would respond to this dream I felt an urgent necessity to relate it to him. And indeed, as usual, his interpretation made me think again. “That’s very interesting,” he said, “because I went to see the Dudjom again yesterday. He told me that Spence is all right but Ian is in bad shape, he’s stuck in the second level of hell because he can’t get reborn again.”
William never tries to impress his opinions or attitudes on you he simply opens doors to previously unrevealed possibilities. We were once discussing dreams, I insisting naively that there were obvious differences between dreams and reality. “How would you define the difference?” said Bill.
“In dreams, if somebody hits you you don’t have a bruise in the morning.”
“Oh don’t you? That’s not true at all, my dear. I’ve woken up with a black eye.”
The day after we had this conversation Damita woke up with two bruised knees. It’s really true. Burroughs seeps into you. When junkies kick they say, “I’m gonna chill out with a little Burroughs.”
Left to right, Victor Bockris, Burroughs’s British publisher, John Calder, Burroughs, Burroughs’s longtime American editor Richard Seaver, unknown, at Books and Company party on the first night of the Nova Convention, New York City, 1978. Photo: Gerard Malanga
DINNER WITH TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: NEW YORK 1977
WILLIAMS: I think we all die, sooner or later. I prefer to postpone the event.
BURROUGHS: Yes, there is that consideration.
WILLIAMS: I’ve always been terrified of death.
BURROUGHS: Why?
WILLIAMS: I’m not sure. I say that, and yet I’m not sure. How about you?
BURROUGHS: One of my students once asked me if I believed in the afterlife and I said, “How do you know you’re not already dead?”
BOCKRIS: Do you experience your own death?
BURROUGHS: Of course.
BOCKRIS: Is it possible to point out in your writing where your death is reflected?
BURROUGHS: I would say in every sentence. I took a serum in Mexico which is supposed to make you live to be one hundred and thirty-five. I found it to work out very well for me.
BOCKRIS: Would you like to live on and on without being able to move?
BURROUGHS: Ah, you are talking about Tithonus, my dear, longevity and the so-called Catch-22: You will live indefinitely but you will not be able to move.
I left the Bunker and walked home, mulling over the significance of the many psychic connections that seemed to extend between myself and Damita and wondered again if Ian Sommerville had been reborn in her dream through some complex extension of Bill’s abilities to relate through me to her. Secret Mullings About Bill. There was a lot of smoke coming out of a vacant building a block away from the gates of the Bunker. Two black men were standing around looking vaguely at the burning building. One of them said, “I wonder if there’s anybody in there.” On impulse I went in. It was an old house, wreckage lay about, the fire was coming in increasingly large flames from a room far in the back. I walked through the house to the back and looked in through an open door. A bed was on fire. Nobody was on it. And I heard a voice I never heard say, “I was once in a room with another person who set the mattress on fire.” And echoing in my memory: “I WANT A DEATH!”