16

BURROUGHS AT LARGE

1962-1969

FOLLOWING HIS DISCOURAGING STAY with Leary, Burroughs was glad to get back to Europe in December 1961, after spending a couple of months in a basement apartment in Brooklyn working on Nova Express, for which Barney Rosset had given him an advance. He hated the New York cocktail party circuit, where people, instead of looking at you, looked at the door to see who was about to arrive. He hated the jockeying for position, what Freud once referred to as “the banal hankering after priority,” the inflated reputations, the shooting stars, the writers who spent 20 percent of their time on their work and 80 percent on their image. He hated the people who claimed to admire your book when it was clear they hadn’t read it. He was far happier in his old Paris haunts, at the Beat Hotel with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, working on cut-ups and tapes. The newest twist was to record street sounds and mix them up and combine them with a cut-up text.

Brion Gysin reported that he had a long cut-up poem appearing in England where it was sure to make quite a fuss—the most violent fuss, my dear. He was going to be talking on Europe 1, the most powerful French radio chain. The French, of course, were dying inside their fossil language and needed to be shaken up a bit. All this did not produce de quoi vivre (wherewithal), however, for Brion had been too busy writing to get out there and kiss asses as they had to be kissed. “There’s nothing I like better than kissing a nice fat ass,” he wrote Paul Bowles, with only partial irony.

With Ian Sommerville, Brion had been working on a device which he hoped had commercial potential. It was a cylinder with slits that revolved on a phonograph turntable and produced, lit from the inside, alpha waves corresponding to thirteen flashes per second, which hit the optic nerve in such a way that they induced visions. Brion called it the Dream Machine, and it was shown that December at an exhibit called L’Objet at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

Looking around for a patron, he heard that Helena Rubinstein, who was then in Paris, had started a foundation to help struggling artists. Brion called her secretary, Patrick O’Higgins, a charming carrot-haired former Guardsman, who, it turned out, had been at Brion’s old school, Downside. Brion took a Dream Machine to show Madame (as she was known), and she said, “Does it have to be black?” He made her a big white one, a meter in diameter, which she placed in the round window of her spectacular apartment on the quai de Béthune. O’Higgins was fascinated by it, and placed inside it a mummified Egyptian cat, 2,000 years old, swathed in bandages. The effect was interesting, but when Madame saw it she shrieked. “Patrick! My best cat!”

To give the Dream Machine some exposure, O’Higgins announced: “Madame, all the ladies from Seventh Avenue are here for the collections and we’re going to give a little breakfast for them.” On the appointed morning, the Dream Machine was spinning, and the ladies took their places in the grand salon and shoveled down their scrambled eggs, knowing they had a long day of fashion watching ahead of them. Madame made her entrance, wearing a little Yves St. Laurent hat that looked like a relic from the Boer War. O’Higgins was pushing her in the right direction with one finger on her shoulder, and someone was heard to say, “I think Patrick O’Higgins is the greatest toymaker in the world.”

It became apparent as she came closer that Madame had two black eyes. O’Higgins told Brion in a stage whisper, “Madame’s money has hurt her.” In the bathroom, Madame had two safe deposit boxes fitted into the wall across from the toilet. She was in the habit, in the midst of her morning ablutions, of unlocking the boxes and playing with her cash and jewelry. “Greedy old girl,” Patrick told Brion, “she pulled out the bottom drawer, and the other one slipped and hit her in the eyes.”

O’Higgins kept plugging the Dream Machine, which was again in evidence at a fashion show Madame gave on her roof garden. Brion was happily ensconced at the heart of the princess circuit. Madame was herself a princess, having married a Georgian prince named Gourielli. When plump Princess Mdivani arrived, her monocle screwed in one puffy eye, it was “How are you this morning, princess,” “Very well, thank you, princess,” “You’re looking beautiful, princess,” “And you’re looking very slim, princess.”

Designed by a Mexican faggot, the dresses, Brion noted, were intended to trip women up. The cruelest clothes I’ve ever seen, he thought. Harry Winston was doing the jewels. Spotting a flash of green on a model’s hand, Princess Mdivani called her over and took the girl’s hand in one of her bearlike paws, and scrutinized the ring through her monocle. She then turned to Harry Winston, who was sitting next to her, and said with princess-like disdain, “Mr. Winston, in India the elephants wear better emeralds.”

Madame next placed the Dream Machine in the window of her shop in the Faubourg St. Honoré. But she didn’t buy it, she still had it on loan. Brion was so exasperated that one day he walked into the shop, picked it up out of the window, and walked off with it, and that was the end of Madame’s sponsorship of the Dream Machine. Later, he took one to Venice to show Peggy Guggenheim, but Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art was there, and said, “The kinetic thing is over, what it is now is pop.” Brion was privy to the secret power, but could never get a piece of it. All these people who knew him and liked him, and yet always the taste of failure in his mouth.

Burroughs was completely supportive of Brion. He thought the Dream Machine was terrific, and had strange visions peering at it. It was time, however, to move back to London and resume his life as head of household with his two acolytes, Ian and Mikey. By February 1962, he was back at the Empress Hotel, much satisfied with his move. With a good English breakfast under his belt—porridge, bacon and eggs, toast and tea—he felt like a new man and got twice as much done. He was abstaining from drugs and sex.

He was shocked to learn on February 5, 1962, in a letter from Kells Elvins’s mother, that his old friend had died in New York of a heart attack. He was only forty-seven years old, and had once had great vitality and élan. But Burroughs remembered Kells telling him that he had felt “the dying feeling” on a trip to Corfu. He had been in the street, walking up a hill, when sweat started pouring out of him and he had to sit down.

Burroughs later learned that Kells had been in New York with his wife Mimi, who was promoting Danish fashions. They were staying at the Biltmore Hotel, and Kells had died in bed. Mimi had him buried in Texas. At that time she was broke, and she was glad to get the $150 the magazine Dude/Gent paid for one of his stories.

As a writer, Kells hadn’t accomplished much. When he was visiting his son, Peter, in Brighton, Massachusetts, he talked about what a committed writer he was, but Peter, who watched him fill his glass with vodka all day long, saw that his real commitment was to booze. Kells was convinced that his health had been ruined in the marines, so why bother? He had let himself get fat and out of condition, and was always going on about his lousy ticker.

Burroughs remembered a friendship that went back to childhood and had lasted all their adult lives. Perhaps each was looking at the other as someone he wished to be. Burroughs admired Kells’s social ease and success with women. Boy, he sure had a way with women. Why, he could get right into any woman, and always had three or four beauties on a string. Also, it was thanks to Kells that he had started writing again, when they had collaborated on that routine about the sinking ship. If it hadn’t been for that, he would have given up writing completely. Burroughs remembered that in his garden on Price Road, he and Kells had seen a blacksnake shaking its tail in dead leaves, pretending to be a rattlesnake, an image he had used in Junky. Kells had once written a song called “When Your Time Comes to Go,” with the line “I’m gonna go on boozin’ till my time comes to go.”

In Burroughs’ own life, the old points of argument with Mikey had disappeared, although there were some difficulties between Ian and Mikey. But Ian was one head he couldn’t walk on. He wasn’t tractable like Mikey, he was stubborn and high-strung, and retreated into a sullen remoteness when displeased. Mikey, however, seemed to have no identity of his own, and his faculty for imitating others was such that Burroughs began to see him as a body waiting to be possessed, perhaps by inhospitable forces. Once, when Mikey had a cold sore on his lip, Burroughs refused to see him, because a cold sore was a point of entry for those forces. Another time, Burroughs accompanied Mikey to Lord Goodman’s to discuss what could be done about his heroin habit. Lady Frankau, a psychiatrist who treated junkies, was there. She was ardently opposed to the Dent apomorphine treatment, and urged that Mikey be admitted to a sanitarium. When they got back to Burroughs’ basement flat in Bayswater, he saw something silvery slip off Mikey’s shoulder, like silver light. He could see it quite clearly. It hit him right in the chest. He stood up to get a glass of water and passed out. A couple of minutes later he came around. Burroughs felt that he was the target of a curse which had come via Mikey from Lady Frankau. She and Dr. Dent at the time were struggling over Mikey. She was in agreement with the U.S. Department of Narcotics, which did not want the apomorphine treatment to spread. Just about that time, in 1961, Dr. Dent died, but his treatment continued to be administered by his assistants.

Back in London in August 1962 after the Edinburgh conference, he met through Brion Gysin a languid, lanky filmmaker named Anthony Balch, who had made several low-budget horror films such as Horror Hospital. He had an office in Wardour Street, the center of the marginal film business, and earned his bread by buying the rights to European soft-core porn films for distribution in the United Kingdom. It turned out that Balch was a Burroughs fan, and wanted to experiment with filming some of his cut-up texts. The film’s working title was Towers Open Fire, and in January 1963 they shot a scene with Anthony’s antiquated windup World War II 35mm camera in the board room of the British Film Institute, in which Burroughs, as the chairman of the board, rose and said, “Gentlemen, this was to be expected—after all, he’s been a medium all his life.”

More and more, Burroughs was operating under the conviction, constantly reinforced by Brion Gysin, that his writing placed him in danger, that he was surrounded by enemies who were out to do him in. He had a kind of “it’s-them-or-us” siege mentality. When Dead Fingers Talk, an amalgam of Burroughs texts, was brought out by John Calder at the start of 1963, there were predictably hostile reviews, and Gysin wrote Burroughs, “Do you take your dish of tea with lemon or with venom, my dear?”

Burroughs now saw himself as one of his characters, inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police. He began to wonder whether Mikey was an agent sent to perturb his existence. Mikey had a sister named Suna who was fed up with his addiction and who, in March 1963, informed their mother that he was a junky. Suna portrayed Burroughs as an evil influence who had no interest in Mikey’s recovery and would be of no assistance in helping him find a cure. Mrs. Portman’s Greek boyfriend recommended cutting off Mikey’s allowance. Burroughs, when apprised of the situation, was irate. He had done everything he could to get Mikey off heroin, but that was something no one could do for you. As for the boyfriend, he was just an opportunist, exploiting Mikey’s mother for all he could get. Seeking advice, Mrs. Portman went to Lord Goodman, who told her that Burroughs had a positive influence on her son. Cleared of all charges, Burroughs was introduced to Mikey’s mother, who was cordial in that uppity British way.

Burroughs wanted to spend the summer of 1963 in Tangier, but was concerned that it was infested with Beatniks and hippies. Paul Bowles reported that “the only way to live in Morocco now is to remember constantly that the world outside is still more repulsive.” Burroughs agreed, arriving in June with Ian, Mikey, and Brion Gysin. He took a house on the Marshan, the plateau overlooking the sea, at 4 calle Larache. Alan Ansen arrived, and there was a new crop of Americans on hand—Irving Rosenthal, who had edited Naked Lunch for Grove; the New York writer Alfred Chester; the tall, bearded, rabbinical writer-photographer Ira Cohen; and that diminutive veteran of the Beat Hotel, Harold Norse.

Harold thought of himself as “dark-horse Norse,” ignored and unpublished. He harbored bitter thoughts about his colleagues, whom he thought had more success than he did, while deserving it less. Irving Rosenthal he considered a monstrous shit, aberrated and power-struck, a diseased faggot clear through. He didn’t trust Brion, whom he called SOBrion—he had to be the prima donna, and for all his charm, there was a spurious side. These days he talked only to Burroughs, who talked only to God, with contempt for all else. When the Russians announced that they were sending a woman into space, Harold was amused to see Brion’s and Bill’s reaction—they thought it was an ominous threat to carry the matriarchy, the cunt, the Bitch Goddess, into space. What new turn, Harold wondered, would this lead to in Bill’s work? Lesbian colonels attacking fish boys on Mars?

Allen Ginsberg was in India, and one day Burroughs said to Norse: “Allen’s always talking about attaining an egoless state through Indian meditation. Hell, I can do that anytime.” “What do you mean?” Norse asked. “Well, man, like your personality disappears and you’re not in your body. Look—watch.” Burroughs stood up and his eyes went dead. His face was blank. Norse felt as if he was looking at an Egyptian mummy. He called, “Bill, Bill,” but there was no reply. Finally, Bill looked at him and said, “See what I mean?” Norse told him the story of the two magicians, each trying to scare the other. The first one went through a series of elaborately frightening tricks, and then it was the other one’s turn, and the other one said, “Boo!”

As for the other leading Beats, Jack Kerouac had moved to Northport, Long Island, in December 1962 with his mother. The house and garden were surrounded by a six-foot-high Alaskan cedar fence so that nobody could see him reading in the sun, or walking among his tomato plants, or Mémère feeding the birds. Mémère protected him from the outside world and “pain-in-the-ass visitors.” She smilingly approved of his retreat from all-embracing acceptance into blinkered redneck suspicion. Of the white civil rights activists, Kerouac said that they “would hire Negroes to wash their toilet bowls,” and the Jews had “flung the Negro at America so that we’d forget anti-Semitism.” When friends showed up, Mémère repeated her favorite joke: “I sure had a hard time when I made Jack, and he’s still giving me a hard time.” Publicly, she bemoaned his drinking, but privately, she encouraged it by matching him drink for drink, and kept a bottle of Southern Comfort under her bed. Jack wrote drunken letters to friends excoriating women forever. Some dopey Jap Vassar cunt, he complained, had psychoanalyzed him by using the material in Subterraneans. It was a real square Vassar shot, with some idiot conclusions. So the heroine was based on a “living woman.” What did they want him to do, screw cadavers? Jack had a horrible vision of the toomuchness of the world—of his mind essence completely blasted by music, people, books, papers, movies, games, sex, talk, business, taxes, cars, asses, gases, etc. He wanted to return to the simplicity of former times.

As for Gregory Corso, he was now a heroin addict, in thrall to the white muse. He had married Sally November (a onetime girlfriend of Bob Dylan’s) and had a daughter, but had lost both, as well, he was sure, as the talent that burned within him. All these years the muse and the companionship of his fellow poets had carried him, but now he would be deathly ill without the white muse. He had been a poet, writing with chastising arrogance, his name and fame were spread far and wide, and it had felt good to be recognized. But suddenly it no longer felt good, he became immensely shy, his life was split in two. The boy with six sets of parents who had gone to jail surfaced from his subconscious and made him feel his fame was not deserved. The poet and the boy fluctuated back and forth. Unlike those who took drugs for kicks, he wanted to get off, he had never enjoyed the blood running down his arms.

And yet there were some good moments. At a Larry Rivers party in early 1963 in New York, he had overheard an elderly lady asking her husband, “Is that Gregory Corso?” and the husband admonished her for being so embarrassingly fanlike, and led her away down the elevator, and Gregory raced down the steps and met them outside and put his arms around the woman and said, “I am Gregorio and how are you and lo spring is coming.” When he said good-bye he could see that she and her husband were glowing, that he had made them happy and was admired by them, and it made him feel wonderful all over because he knew that he was through with that creepy time when he and Allen and the others were seen as spider-eyed conspirators when in truth they were the best people in the world.

In Palm Beach, Billy Burroughs was growing up with his grandparents, whom he loved. Except that sometimes he secretly thought, “If they were dead, my father would have to take care of me.” Palm Beach, where the police were so polite, and the lawns were so cropped and green, and the members of the Coral Beach Club suffered from terminal complacency, and strollers on Worth Avenue wore pastel clothes. At Cobblestone Gardens, on Worth Avenue, Laura and Mote sold Victorian chairs with taloned paws, porcelain dogs, music boxes, green pine cones from Maine, and large red strawberries made out of soap.

At the end of the day, after dusting the artificial flowers, they drove home to their two-bedroom, one-story house at 202 Sanford Avenue, a street lined with royal palms at the north end of town. The house was a bit run down; the sliding windows didn’t slide, their aluminum frames being corroded by the salt air. Laura played records on a Victrola in a wooden box. One of her favorites was “Que Serà, Serà.” The song seemed to Billy to reflect a fatalistic strain in her character. She did not wish to face things, and one of her sayings was “Some things are better left unsaid.” It seemed to Billy that Mote loved Laura so much that he had allowed her to submerge his identity. Mote told Billy that he must never look over his shoulder while driving, because if you did your hand might turn the wheel without your realizing it—a certain European king had been killed that way. Billy later reflected that this was his grandfather’s worldview, expressed in Mote language.

Sometimes Billy asked himself: What do I really remember? He didn’t even know what his mother looked like, never having seen a photograph. In Mexico there was a tiled circular staircase, always cool, and a friend downstairs who kept a rabbit that hopped across the courtyard and bit him on the toe, after which his mother bought him a pair of shoes.

His father was a vague and distant figure, who came to visit from time to time. Once he took Billy to Stouffer’s and told him a story about two little monsters who cut off a cat’s head with garden shears. It was refreshing to Billy to hear something that wasn’t a hundred percent wholesome. Even though Billy rarely saw his father, they kept in touch. Surprising items arrived in the mail—a collection of beautiful Amazonian butterflies in little glass cases; an edition of Rimbaud’s poems with the English translation on the facing page. Everything he received from his father Billy kept in a locked green tin box in the bottom drawer of his bureau. Also locked away, as yet unexamined, was Billy’s dilemma: How would he be able to love the man who had, as he knew from his grandmother, killed his mother and abandoned him? How would he be able to emulate and respect this man?

Every weekday Billy rode his English bicycle to a Palm Beach private school, where he attended classes with Kelloggs and Dodges and Posts. He wrote his father that he had won the trophy for being the outstanding boy in the fifth grade. He had made the Safety Patrol, the football team, the scholastic honor roll and the citizenship honor roll. “I’m afraid there is an awful lot about me in this letter,” he wrote. Under his signature there was a heart with an arrow through it. In the seventh grade, he informed his father he had written an essay on the value of turning in homework. He grew into his teens, an overweight boy with a high forehead, large apprehensive eyes, and brown hair that fell across his brow. Once he grabbed a potato chip from a buffet table set up for a school function and was reprimanded by the principal, who called him “chubby.”

In 1960, at age thirteen, Mote reported, Billy was quite a big boy, “plump as a partridge,” but he was lazy and his marks were not very good, though he had a good vocabulary and wrote well—but he tended to inject an irreverent sense of humor that was not appreciated by his teachers. He was being tutored four and a half hours a week in Latin and three hours a week in French. He had six book reports to write, including one on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, which seemed to Mote beyond the comprehension of a thirteen-year-old in its extremely difficult and involved sentences.

As he grew older, Billy was less interested in schoolwork than he was in fun and games. He sneaked into the north tower of the Biltmore Hotel, a vantage point for peeping at the naked ladies in the solarium, and came upon a baby owl. Forgetting the naked ladies, he wrapped the little white creature in his shirt and exited bare-chested through the elegant lobby, restoring it to health and freedom. With a friend, he heisted one of the big bronze lions off the steps of the public library and somehow hauled it—it felt like it weighed a ton—down the Via Mizner to the back door of one of the richest persons in town. Three days later it was back on its perch in front of the library. He broke a front tooth showing off to some girls that he could drink champagne from the bottle. Just call me Zorba the Schmuck. His grandmother took him to the dentist to have a good tooth put in and told him, “Try to keep your mouth closed whenever possible.”

In 1962, when he was fifteen, Laura and Mote gave him a motorbike for his birthday. One summer evening he was drinking Roma port cooking wine with Bobby Furey and Al Morton (names changed), who broke the empty bottle and held a jagged spar against his forearm: “Think I’m chicken?” “Oh, haw haw yes,” roared the other two. Pearls of blood formed on his arm like red sweat. Billy took him to the emergency room on his motorbike.

Billy’s best friend, Lawrence Reeves, had an air rifle with which he shot woodpeckers, on the pretext of keeping them out of his father’s mango trees. When Billy saw their stove-in backs and the deeper red on the red feathers he felt real fear.

Mote’s sons had grown up with guns, and he gave his grandson a .22 rifle. One day in the fall of 1962, Larry and Billy were in Billy’s room after school. Larry was sitting on the bed and Billy sat across from him on a chair, aiming his .22 at him, sighting through the scope. In the circle he saw Larry’s face, a little quizzical, a little scornful, the cross hairs intersecting right between and a little above his eyebrows. His finger twitched, there was a concussion in the air, and he saw a red dot the size of a thumbtack on Larry’s neck, an inch to the right of his Adam’s apple. He had been certain the gun was empty. At the same time he was surprised that it had fired so low. The sound of his friend’s voice screaming, “He shot me!” rang in his ears. Then there was the pandemonium of ambulance-calling and hand-wringing, and the arrival of Larry’s parents, and the look and passing blow Larry’s father gave Billy. The doctor said that if the bullet had struck half an inch in any other direction Larry would have been killed. The next day the police came with a stenographer who had a little machine on a tripod and took Billy’s statement. They also took the bullet. He and Larry never spoke again. Billy wondered to what extent he was destined to duplicate the acts of his father. “Cursed” would be a better word. Was there something inside him that made him act out, in compulsive repetition, what had gone on before? Was he but an echo of his father’s voice?

After the shooting, Billy was depressed. His schoolwork was increasingly erratic. Laura and Mote thought he needed a change. Billy said he wanted to be with his father. Burroughs agreed to take him. It was arranged that Billy would join him in Tangier in July 1963, when he had turned sixteen. There was an American school in Tangier (the headmaster was Omar Pound, son of Ezra) that he could attend in the fall. And so it was that Billy said good-bye to his grandparents and flew to New York, where he connected with a flight to Lisbon. In the Lisbon airport, on the other side of the customs barrier, an odd-looking man, wearing a suit and a hat in the summer heat, waved at him. He looked like an English bank clerk. When he approached, greeting him with awkward gestures and a smile that seemed forced, Billy noticed that his fingers were stained a dark nicotine yellow. Almost at once, to relieve the tension, he lit a cigarette from a pack of Players.

For Burroughs, bringing Billy to Tangier was an overdue attempt to connect with his estranged son. He was loaded with guilt because of Joan’s death, and because he had so long avoided his responsibility as a father. He would now make it up to Billy by taking care of him. But raising a son in Tangier had about as much chance of success as growing orchids in the Moroccan desert. Billy was being brought into a homosexual household consisting of Burroughs and his two lovers, one of whom was barely older than he was; a household in which drugs were regularly and freely used. Through his father, Billy would meet the members of Tangier’s expatriate homosexual set. It was a bizarre and dislocating setting for a suggestible sixteen-year-old. In assuming the responsibility for his son, Burroughs was inadvertently contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

They arrived at the house on calle Larache after dark. Billy was exhausted, and everything was disorganized. His father had not given any thought to where Billy would sleep, and blankets were hastily thrown over a couch. The lights weren’t working. Burroughs lit candles until Ian arrived and hit a power pole with a broomstick. Mikey at once started one-upping him saying, “You needn’t insist you’re fresh from America.” The next morning, Billy was awakened by Ian, who sat on his bed and talked to him and gently took his hand and tried to draw it to his groin. He hadn’t been there twenty-four hours and they were already putting the make on him. What next?

After breakfast, Burroughs said, “Ian, take Billy down to the Gran Socco and help him pick out a pipe.” That evening he had his pipe and smoked his first kif, pleased to be included in his father’s entourage rather than treated like a child.

It was a job adapting to his father’s way of life. In a sense he had more freedom in Palm Beach, where he could be out of the house with friends his own age. Here he had to hang around while his father banged away on his typewriter or sat in his orgone box in the upstairs hall, or smoked kif. When they went to bars, he had to fight off the advances of the simpering Tangier queens:

“We all knew you were coming and wondered what you looked like.”

“I know I’m old, but I really haven’t lost my figure, dear.”

“Well, baby! I mean if you ever want your nuts blowed!”

Burroughs took Billy to the American School to introduce him to the headmaster, but he was surly and uncooperative—he didn’t open his mouth. When school started in September, he attended for three days and quit. Burroughs asked him what the matter was, and Billy said he didn’t want to go to school—it was too much trouble. He had brought his guitar with him, and said he wanted to learn to play flamenco. Burroughs, whose life and work were devoted to the cultivation of unfettered personal freedom, was unable to tell his son that he must go to school. He was in no position, either by temperament or logic, to be a disciplinarian.

One night, when Burroughs lay in bed, listening to Billy play the guitar in the next room, he was filled with an overwhelming sadness. “Where are you, Billy, where are you?” he asked himself, and there was no reply. He knew they were not connecting. Their conversations were strained and hollow. The right thing was said at the wrong time, and the wrong thing at the right time. It was all so stilted and difficult. What could you do when someone was operating out of a deliberate flaunting mechanism? Every suggestion Burroughs made was resisted. It was Billy’s way of making his old man pay. He told Billy, “I don’t want you to leave the kif and the dope right out on the goddamned living room table where anyone can walk in and see it. What if it gets back to the consulate?” But every goddamned time he’d find it out there and put it away himself and find it out there again the next day.

What struck Burroughs the most was that when he was sixteen years old the idea of going to Tangier would have been the most romantic thing he could imagine . . .  smoking hashish in the native quarter . . . drinking mint tea in an Arab café . . . to an imaginative sixteen-year-old schoolboy that was Nirvana. But Billy never seemed to give a shit. He had no enthusiasm whatever. He never wanted to go anywhere. It did not impress him that he was in contact with a new reality. Where was his sense of wonder? At sixteen Burroughs would have been transported, but it did not make any more difference to Billy than if he was in Toledo, Ohio. Too bad, thought Burroughs, because no matter how badly you wanted to get back at somebody, it wasn’t worth doing at the cost of total apathy—you had to have something of your own.

Father and son soon came to realize that the arrangement was not going to work out. Billy made Burroughs uncomfortable, hanging around like a living reproach. Billy began to miss Palm Beach and his grandparents, old and square as they were, screening his friends, telling him this boy’s parents had each been divorced twice, and that such-and-such a girl seemed to be quite loose. With all its drawbacks, Palm Beach seemed like an improvement over the weird and aimless Tangier life and his father’s homosexual clique. He realized that his father was making as much of an effort as he was capable of. He was trying to make the house more of a home, and had fashioned a ten-foot-long mahogany table from some wood he had bought. He was having Billy tutored in math by Ian, and was doing some English tutoring himself. But Billy knew that wasn’t enough, and he had to think about graduating from high school. Finally it was Ian, who had become protective of Billy after his initial pass, who told him, “You don’t want to live in a household of fags.”

Billy told his father that he wanted to go back to Palm Beach and get his high school diploma, and to put a brighter face on his departure, added, “I’m sure this [Tangier] is where I’ll wind up.” The day came in January 1964 when Burroughs took him to the airport and said good-bye. His last words were “Billy, for God’s sakes don’t try to take anything out with you back to the States.” Billy swore up and down he was clean. He must have looked awfully nervous at the customs line in New York because he was singled out right away, and it didn’t take them long to find the majoun. He was lucky; the customs supervisor let him go, saying, “You’re much too young to spend the night in jail.” But from then on, the Burroughs name was on their books.

Burroughs went into a depression after his son’s departure, mulling over what had gone wrong. When Billy was a baby, he thought, I was absolutely devoted to him. I carried him around and fed him more than Joan did. But then I lost him. There was just such a gap, he wasn’t the same person. We didn’t connect. It was a total failure. He was here six months, and we never got to know each other at all. From the beginning to the end, Billy had been inaccessible and emotionally dead.

Burroughs blamed himself for his inability to communicate. He knew that he was suffering from a deep emotional blockage that made him unable to really level with Billy and explain to him the true circumstances of Joan’s death. The opportunity for catharsis, where father and son might have wept and hugged and shared their grief, had come and gone. It was that frustrating family trait, the inability to express emotion. It also made him unable to show anger with Billy. There was never an overt quarrel. In the Burroughs family, to make a scene was unthinkable. He had never heard his mother or father raise their voices to each other. It was good in one way, but bad in another, for making a scene cleared the air, and in Billy’s case it would have broken the logjam.

It may have been because of Billy that the trouble with the neighbors started. Billy had made the mistake of going up on the roof, where unveiled women did the wash and gossiped. For a Nazarene to see them without their veils was a major infraction of the Koran, and retribution was swift—mud was flung at their front door.

Or it may have been Ian, who was then going through a very difficult paranoid period. Ian had “hot brains,” as one of his Moroccan friends put it. He was being deliberately promiscuous with Arabs, as a way of freeing himself from what he felt was the hold that Burroughs had over him. He was trying to get away from that “merging-of-souls” side that Burroughs had pushed on Allen. Ira Cohen, the writer-photographer, recalls standing with Ian in front of the Hotel Muniria, located at the bottom of a hill. Ian had his back to the top of the hill, where Burroughs suddenly appeared. Ira saw him but didn’t show it. Suddenly, as Ira was talking to him, Ian began walking backward up the hill as if pulled by a magnet, and kept walking without turning around until he was level with Burroughs. It was spooky. There seemed to be some occult takeover of personality at work.

Actually, at that time, Burroughs was trying to demonstrate an absence of possessiveness. He told Ian he did not require fidelity, and did not object to his liaisons with Arabs. But Ian was in a bad state. He started seeing a deaf-mute, who forced him into degrading situations with other Arabs. He even began to speak a little Arabic, which was not helpful, because he began to understand what they were saying about him. Ian was no empire-builder; if anything, he felt inferior to the Arabs.

Ian’s abandoned behavior with local young Arab men may have earned the disdain and hostility of the neighbors. Burroughs and company were the only foreigners on calle Larache, and they made the mistake of not employing Moslems. If you employed a Moslem or two, they told the others, I work for these people and they are all right. Burroughs began to feel under siege. Every time he stepped out the door, he was showered with insults. People pounded on the door at six in the morning, shouting Arabic imprecations, and he was not sure why. What exactly had they done? Children threw rocks at the house, and on one occasion they broke the skylight. One evening, Burroughs heard a low wailing in the street, a sort of “ul-ul-ul-ul-al-aiiiii” and stepped out on the balcony, and there was a group of fifty veiled and white-robed women gathered in front of the house, chanting away. He thought of Orpheus, torn to pieces by madwomen, and stuck out his arm, spreading the fingers of his hand. With that one gesture, the women scattered. They obviously know, he thought, that I am not a friend of women.

Burroughs badly wanted to move to another part of town, but he was broke. It infuriated him that Girodias owed him $5,000—his royalties were not yet coming directly from Grove in New York—and in January 1964 he made a special trip to Paris to collect, only to be met by Maurice’s “I-am-helpless” shrug with hands widespread to illustrate the utter void of his financial situation. “So put me in jail,” Maurice said, holding out his hands for the cuffs. “I don’t want to put you in jail,” Burroughs said. “I want what you owe me for Chrissakes.” But it was hopeless.

Stopping off in London on the way back to Tangier for a television interview, he had another nasty surprise. The customs official at Heathrow checked his name against a list, crossed out the “three months” on his visa, and stamped “permitted to land on condition does not stay longer than two weeks.” “Why have you come to England Mr. Burroughs?” he inquired. Deadpan, he replied, “For the food and the climate.” He was indignant at being treated like an undesirable character. Having a two-week visa looked bad on his passport. It was the Lenny Bruce treatment. He vowed not to return to England unless he was treated like any other visitor.

For lack of money, he was forced to remain at calle Larache, but despite the harrassment, he was able to work. He was still producing cut-ups, and wrote the New York poet Ted Berrigan that “to me the most interesting aspect of the cut-ups is that it introduces the unexpected into writing, that is you never know what will happen next and many of my best characters have cut in from the cut-ups. Also lines of straight narrative arise from cut-ups.” He was contributing an “Uncle William” column to My Own Mag, a creation of the London counterculture figure Jeff Nuttall. This satire on the standard corny advice column had its moments, as in:

“Dear Uncle William, I am dating a transvestite and wonder whether I should go ‘all the way.’ Sincerely yours, Prince Philip.”

“Dear Phil, Watch out for the ‘I’ve got the rag on lemme pull you off’ routine. Uncle William.”

“Dear Uncle William, I hear the bugle calling me to the service of the flesh. Should I go? Yours Truly, Tommy Atkins, homosap.”

“Not much choice, Tommy. Uncle William.”

“One has to think of writing as any other job,” Burroughs wrote his mother. “You work at it all day and every day if you want to make a living.” His mother reported that Billy was having problems with schoolwork, and wondered whether he should see a therapist. Burroughs was against it, having had unrewarding experiences in that direction. Responding like a true alumnus of the Los Alamos school, with its emphasis on physical fitness, he recommended that Billy take boxing and jujitsu, which would build up his confidence. Burroughs himself had been made to take boxing at Los Alamos and had loathed it.

When Burroughs told Paul Bowles about his neighbor trouble, Paul just shrugged and kept his thoughts to himself. The trouble with Burroughs was that he never seemed to realize that he was living in Morocco. He wouldn’t have anything to do with Moroccans, which was not quite the right attitude. His problems probably started with some tiny thing. Some kids may have annoyed him, and he may have slapped one, whereas one had to go out of one’s way to be friendly. But Paul couldn’t tell him that, because he didn’t want to be playing the role of the old Morocco hand. He did not think A could save B from trouble. Nor did he think A should try. But A always did, or nearly always. He felt that people only learned when their ignorance made them suffer.

Look at Alfred Chester, who seemed to Paul totally unsuited to life in Morocco. Brooklyn-born, Chester had studied to become a rabbi, but a fever had deprived him of all facial and body hair, and you couldn’t be a hairless rabbi. His mother made him wear a toupée. Paul noticed that when he went to the bathroom he would stay there for half an hour, and when he emerged there would be a strange odor of collodion in the air. Paul thought he was shooting up, but all he was doing was regluing his reddish wig.

Once he invited Paul and Jane to lunch and when they got there he was lying on the floor as though unconscious, completely bald. “I want to read you a letter,” he said. “I’ve just written my father and I want to see if you think it’s all right.” Paul read the letter and said, “Well, he shouldn’t be too upset by it. After all, if that’s the way you feel.” “I know,” said Chester, “but there’s a great problem. I don’t know where to send it.” “Isn’t he with your mother, and if not, wouldn’t she be able to give you his address?” “He died eight years ago,” Chester said. Paul thought at first he must be joking, but he wasn’t, he was absolutely serious.

Chester was an interesting writer, Paul thought; he had a story in the O. Henry Prize Stories, and another in Best American Short Stories, and he contributed a monthly review column to Book Week, but to call him bizarre was an understatement. One summer he rented a house on the beach at Arsilah, a pretty coastal town twenty miles south of Tangier, and he filled one entire room with several tons of oranges, which of course rotted. He took in two runaway dogs who bit several small children, and he had to pay bribes and fines. Since it was a very hot summer, he fixed a pulley on the roof, and paid some urchins to bring seawater up in buckets, so that he had a perfect roof pool for himself and his dogs. Of course the water leaked through into the entire house and wrecked everything.

Chester fell under the spell of a Moroccan named Driss. Like Brion Gysin, he was dying to know all about magic. But as soon as he began to practice it, he became convinced that it was being practiced against him. He started hearing voices, and went to see Paul to demand that he stop broadcasting. No matter what Paul said, Chester replied, “I know, I know, you don’t know watcher doing, do you?” Because of the magic, ordinary objects took on an ominous significance. Paul had a sweet potato hanging in his hall and Chester told him to get rid of it, saying, “It’s evil, it grows too fast.” Paul said he wanted to see how long the vine would get. The next time Chester came he gave an awful cry and shouted, “It has the evil eye!” and lurched forward and fell on the floor.

At that time, the entrepreneurial writer-photographer Ira Cohen was soliciting contributions from Tangier writers for a magazine he wanted to put out called Gnaoua, after a spiritual brotherhood of Moroccan trance dancers. He had heard their incredible music, and it was precisely that kind of energy he wanted in his magazine. Through his duties as editor, Ira was caught in a little drama where egos clashed and behavior spilled over into the irrational. Apparently, Irving Rosenthal, one of the contributors to Gnaoua, was annoyed because he always had to visit Paul and Paul never came to visit him. To express his pique,, he changed a line in his story, which originally said, “Some of the campiest queens I know have cocks drier than the mouth of an Arab caught between Taroudant and Tafraout with plenty of teeth and no water,” substituting “Paul Bowles” for “an Arab.”

Ira Cohen did not know what to do. If he cut the line, Irving would withdraw his story and the magazine was already in proof. But Paul had also contributed a story, which Ira wanted to lose even less. When Ira showed the proofs to Paul, he zeroed in like an eagle on that line of Irving’s, before looking at his own story. Paul asked Ira what he was going to do, and Ira said, “Maybe I should just print a different copy of the magazine for each of the contributors.”

Then Burroughs, having gotten wind of the incident, and being a contributor himself, came by Ira’s house that March. Ira knew he was not there just to see the proofs; he wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and Ira told him. “Well,” said Burroughs, “I guess controversy is a good thing.”

Now it happened that when Burroughs dropped by, Alfred Chester was visiting Ira. When Ira unbolted the front door and said, “Hello, Bill,” Chester jumped up and ran upstairs. He had written a negative review of Naked Lunch in Commentary, and knew that he had done it in a glib reviewer way, and that he couldn’t stand behind what he’d written, and he was too embarrassed to face Burroughs (who, incidentally, had not seen the review).

Alfred Chester took the quarrel between Paul Bowles and Irving Rosenthal as a matter of crucial importance. A few days later he burst into Ira Cohen’s house as though he was on fire and said: “I’ve got it all worked out. You know that thing of Irving’s . . . I’ve made an appointment to see Jane and I’m going to tell her that for $5,000 I will get you to drop that line.”

“Listen,” Ira Cohen said, “you’re out of your mind.”

“Don’t worry,” Chester said, “you’ll get half the money.”

“You should give Irving half the money,” Ira Cohen said.

“Fuck Irving,” Chester said. “You want to give Irving anything you give it to him out of your share. You’re in this up to your neck and you’re in it with me.”

“You’re totally crazy,” Ira Cohen said.

Then Chester said, “Give me that letter.”

He was referring to a note that Paul Bowles had sent Ira. Paul prided himself on never showing any emotion, but Alfred Chester had so infuriated him that he had thrown a dish on the floor and broken it. It was after losing his temper that Paul wrote Ira in a jocular vein: “Alfred Chester is being impossible and I’ve arranged to have him knocked off.”

Ira had unfortunately told Alfred Chester about the letter, which he now demanded, to help him in his scheme to collect $5,000—he would tell Jane that he had received a death threat from Paul and that he was going to send a copy to the State Department in Washington.

“Don’t do it,” Ira said, but then another visitor arrived, and Ira told his girlfriend Rosalyn, “Look, Alfred is totally out of his mind, just keep him busy while I deal with this other thing.” A few minutes later, Chester raced out the door, screaming, “I’ve got it ha ha ha.” It turned out that Rosalyn, instead of calming him, had given him the letter and urged him to ask for $10,000 instead of $5,000.

Alfred Chester went to see Jane Bowles, who, as he explained his scheme, kept saying, “But Alfred, I love you.” “Don’t talk to me about love,” he said, “I want the $10,000 and I want it in unmarked bills.”

Getting nowhere, Chester went to see the American consul and said, “Paul Bowles is trying to assassinate me through Moroccans.” The next thing Paul knew he was summoned before the consul, a man named Schultz, who said: “You must understand that I don’t take this seriously, but I’m obliged to ask you about it, because an American citizen says that you threatened to kill him. He has requested the protection of the marines.” Schultz accepted Paul’s explanation but shook his head and said, “In my entire consular career, this is the only place I’ve ever been posted where I understand nothing of what is going on.”

Even in Tangier, where there was a high degree of tolerance for eccentric behavior, there were limits, which Alfred Chester exceeded, and soon after the “death threat” incident, the Moroccan authorities deported him. He moved to Jerusalem where he committed suicide. He was in a sense, Paul reflected, one of the casualties of Tangier, a city which tended to intensify whatever tendencies one had.

That May of 1964, Burroughs’ first substantial payment from Grove Press arrived, which allowed him to move into a penthouse in the heart of Tangier, at 16 rue Delacroix, in the Loteria building. Proud of being financially independent at last, he wrote his mother that he had $2,000 in the bank at Gibraltar and was planning to see a good lawyer so that he could set up a trust fund that would provide Billy with a comfortable income for life. His mother replied with a mild dig about the obscenity in his books: “Someday I wish you would write a book that we can read and dedicate it to Billy—he would like that.”

Paul came to visit Burroughs in his splendid penthouse, which had a distinctly nautical look, with porthole windows and leather chairs, and a huge balcony like the deck of a ship. All around the living room there were shelves, and each one was piled with large folios filled with newspaper clippings and photographs and bits of pasted-up prose. “I’ll show you how I work,” Burroughs said, and Paul followed him around the room as he dipped from notebook to notebook. “Let’s see,” he said, “New York Times, April 16, 1917, yeah, uh-uh, tornado in Illinois.” Then he picked up another and said, “Herald Tribune, March 5, 1934, tornado in Oklahoma.” “See,” he explained to Paul, “I get them all put together, I collate them.” Paul did not tell him what he thought of the cut-up system, but was amused by Burroughs’ ultimate defense of it: “It works in the hand of a master.”

Burroughs continued to have trouble with the locals in his new neighborhood. One time, as he was coming home from a rather festive evening, an Arab shoeshine boy began to shout insults at him. Enough was enough. Burroughs slammed an elbow in his face and chased him into a vacant lot where the cornered Arab picked up a rock and threw it, hitting him in the knee, which was cut and bruised.

That summer there was another infestation of hippies. Jane Bowles was right, thought Burroughs, when she said they were a menace to her way of life. She was afraid that the resident foreign colony would suffer as a result of the attention they attracted. There were periodic crackdowns and arrests. One man, arrested for photographing Arab boys in pornographic poses, was sentenced to five years and served five months. The Istiqlal, the Nationalist party, which was antiforeign and antiqueer, was putting on pressure to rid Morocco of these degenerate foreigners.

In October, Burroughs wrote Brion Gysin that he was disgusted with Tangier “like I turn sick with the sight of crabs. The whole town solid cunt territory and everyone knocks himself or herself out to show you how worthless they can be. . . . All this happened since about the time of the Kennedy assassination. . . . I must get out before I open up with laser guns on the wretched idiot inhabitants. These people are going to fight Israel? What you see here is the Arabs at their worst. . . . There is not even material here for a riot. No guts left in this miserable town.”

Burroughs decided to leave for New York, since Brion Gysin was going to be there marketing his Dream Machine. He claimed to have signed a contract with a toy manufacturer who was going to produce them en masse, and was ready to pick the money tree. Skeptical as usual, Paul Bowles said of the Dream Machine, “It promises a new kick to the juvenile delinquents.”

Burroughs arrived in New York on December 8, aboard the Independence, gratified that he had been invited to the captain’s cocktail party as a famous author. Upon landing, however, he got the “right-this-way” treatment. He was detained at customs for three hours while two narcotics agents named Ahearn and Cohen went through seven suitcases filled with books and papers. It was, Burroughs was certain, the fallout from Billy’s majoun bust at the airport in January. “What, more books?” they complained. “More folders?” Where was the kilo of hashish? They read his diaries and saw something about feeling sick, and asked, “Does this refer to narcotic withdrawal?” Such was the police mind, Burroughs reflected, as limited as a beagle’s. They found nothing to confiscate, and when they released him, they said, “We treated you like a gentleman.” But they told Brion Gysin, who was waiting outside: “Are you a friend of that man in there? He sure writes some filthy stuff.”

Burroughs had a “return-to-St.-Louis” assignment for Playboy, and took the train from New York on December 22. The long train ride put him in mind of former trips with the family: The Green Hat in his mother’s lap, a delicate gray cone forming on the tip of his father’s cigar. He was on the lookout for all signs of offensive change. Where were the old brass spittoons? Where was the smell of worn leather? In other words, who put the sand in the spinach? Gazing out the window, he saw acres of rusting car bodies, streams crusted with sewage, American flags over empty fields, crooked crosses in winter stubble—Church of Christ. A knock on the door: Half an hour out of St. Louis, sir.

The nudes were still there across from the station. Burroughs remembered hitting a parked car one night long ago, and being thrown out of his car, and rolling across the pavement, and standing up and feeling for broken bones right under those monumental bronze nudes by Carl Milles, depicting the meeting of the Missouri and Mississippi river waters.

At the Chase Plaza Hotel, he bounced on the bed and tested the hot water taps, like a good European. The next day he took a walk in Forest Park and thought of the times he had gone there with his Welsh nurse, who always said, “Don’t ask questions and don’t pass remarks.” The first part of that injunction he had been forced to disregard for professional reasons, while for years he had remained uncertain as to what exactly constituted the second part, finally settling for “You spilled gravy down your tie.”

He looked for anything that might remind him of 1920—a store sign, a lamppost, sunlight on a vacant lot. Down Pershing Avenue to 4664, its solid red brick façade unchanged. “Do you mind if I take pictures? I used to live here, you know.” Where, he wondered, was Rives Matthews, his next-door neighbor? His mother had been to dancing school with Tommy Eliot, whose socks wouldn’t stay up. That evening, he had dinner with Miggy and Mort, still an engineer with Emerson Electric. They lived at 6617 Pershing—hmm, 4664 and 6617 added up to twenty. It seemed emblematic of the permanence and sameness of Mort’s life.

The next day, he drove around with Mort and took pictures. Clayton and the suburbs were built up beyond recognition. At the John Burroughs School, he looked for the locker-room door where he had stood one afternoon, watching the sky turn black and green. In the center of town, there was the old courthouse. The Arch, still under construction, had an ominous look, as though it might one day be the only landmark to survive an atomic blast. Cobblestone streets along the levee, a remnant of riverboat days. The River Queen and the Admiral, just like they used to be, floating down the Mississippi on a quiet afternoon. MacArthur bridge—just there a truck will crash through the guardrail and fall seventy-five feet, Burroughs imagined, killing the driver. He could see the dotted line in the Post-Dispatch picture. Rejected by Playboy, “Return to St. Louis” was published by the Paris Review.

Back in New York with the New Year, 1965, Burroughs checked into the Chelsea Hotel, which was very much to his liking. It had suites with large fireplaces that reminded him of Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street days, and Stanley Bard, the proprietor, was a patron of the arts known on occasion to accept paintings in lieu of rent. Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, had a suite on the top floor, and invited Burroughs to look through his pride and joy, a $3,000 Questar telescope. He claimed that he could read a newspaper over someone’s shoulder in Union Square, nine blocks away. He showed Burroughs a man and a women eating dinner in their apartment across the street, and you could see exactly what it was they were eating and lip-read their dinner conversation. Clarke struck Burroughs as being like one of his own science fiction characters. He had a way of sliding around the margin of your vision like some semivisible intergalactic mentor. They talked about life on other planets, and Burroughs said that whatever could be written about must exist. In any case, they didn’t all have to breathe oxygen. Clarke showed him a cartoon—a creature staggering out of a spacecraft and gasping “Ammonia!” Also on hand was the composer George Kleinsinger, who kept a menagerie of exotic animals in his room. He was worried about his python’s loss of appetite. He tried canned quail, mice, and white rats. Once the python had to be rescued from a white rat that was biting it. “Oh, you lazy serpent,” Kleinsinger said.

Herbert Huncke, who all these years had been in New York, living by his wits and off his friends, scoring when he could, stealing when he must, in and out of jail, heard that Burroughs was in town, and was offended that he did not get in touch. That was Bill, thought Huncke, he really didn’t give a damn about old friends. But then Bill called and they arranged to meet. On January 19, 1965, however, Bill canceled their appointment because his father had just died. From his tone of voice, Huncke assumed that Bill was taking it in stride.

Burroughs went to Palm Beach for the funeral. His mother seemed to be taking it well. She and Mote had given up Cobblestone Gardens and had been living the senior-citizen Palm Beach life. Billy was not there, he was away at boarding school, and for some reason could not get back in time, but his brother, Mort, was there. Mortimer Burroughs had died of heart failure a few months short of his eightieth birthday. He had always been an enigma to his son. Mortimer’s own father, the inventor, had had no time for his children, and had been unable to express his affection, and perhaps this was the root of his father’s reticence. The list was long of subjects he wouldn’t discuss—sex; Uncle Horace the black sheep; Mrs. White, the woman Burroughs’ inventor grandfather had married shortly before his death. Burroughs knew that she had come to the house once to ask for money and Mortimer had refused to see her. Why? Too late to ask. As he thought of his father, his own identity faded out into a gray impalpable world. It seemed amazing that so close a tie as father and son could have existed between two men who had known each other hardly at all. He wished it could have been otherwise. He would have liked to have told his father that he was grateful for all the years of financial support. Over and out from Cobblestone Gardens.

Back in New York, Burroughs found a loft through Finkelstein the Loft King, also known as the Artist’s Friend, at 210 Centre Street. On the ground floor there was a machine shop called Atomic Machinery Exchange, a name that fitted right into his scheme of things. The loft’s sparsely furnished austerity suited him. There was a bed, a table, a few chairs, and a refrigerator in the corner. An interviewer who came to see him shortly after he moved in reported that instead of finding a warped genius like the Marquis de Sade, he had found a gentleman of the old school, a courteous scholarly person with the serenity of a Chinese sage, who quietly brewed tea, having sworn off drugs. His thoughts were on saving mankind from nuclear destruction, which would occur, he said, “just as soon as the U.S. and Russia sign a mutual nonaggression pact. When you read about that, run for the South Pole. The bombs will start dropping on China before the ink is dry.”

Wanting Ian Sommerville to join him, Burroughs sent him $450 in traveler’s checks. But Ian did not seem eager to leave London. He wrote that with a visitor’s visa he would not be able to work. Did Burroughs really need him there? Burroughs did not insist, and later reflected that the year in New York had been the crucial turning point in their relationship. If he had come to America then things might have been very different. Or would they? The Egyptian hieroglyph for “question” was reeds and water.

In the meantime, Brion Gysin was trying to market the Dream Machine and found a young literary agent named Peter Matson, who was working in his uncle Harold’s literary agency, to help him. Matson ended up as the agent for both Brion and Burroughs, but the Dream Machine project came to nothing. Brion had thought it might work as a psychedelic toy, an emblem of the sixties, but the businessmen were scared off by reports that flicker machines caused epileptic seizures. No one wanted to risk lawsuits. Brion began to think of New York as a city of darkness, a nest of Jews and matriarchy, where hostile forces worked against him.

Burroughs, on the other hand, was a hit, taken up by the downtown crowd. On April 23, 1965, he gave a reading in the Bowery loft of Wyn Chamberlain, an action painter who served a useful social function as a connector of people and giver of parties. In the vapor-lamp dusk, a line of derelicts waited for admittance to the Bowery Mission, while across the street, at 222 Bowery, a former Y.M.C.A., the glitterati assembled to meet a man whose reputation had been enhanced by his absence from the New York scene. The sculptress Marisol was there, with a green bow tie in her hair, and the poets Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan and Frank O’Hara, and the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, and the painters Larry Rivers and Larry Poons and Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol. It was a quorum of the downtown art scene, a charged, electric, high-energy event, recognized as such by The New York Times, who sent a reporter to cover it. Mack Thomas, Burroughs’ friend from the Beat Hotel days, recently sprung from a Texas jail, read from his boyhood memoir Gumbo and sang Methodist hymns with his East Texas drawl. Then Burroughs read, striking the Times reporter, Harry Gilroy, as a latter-day Will Rogers, cracking dry jokes. As he read, he ripped down a white sheet backdrop to reveal a giant rubber tarantula on the wall, illustrating his text. Someone described Burroughs as a “hot spot”—that is, a figure that others converged around.

He gave another reading at a tiny, 129-seat theater on East Fourth Street, produced by the American Theater for Poets at two dollars a ticket. The word had spread among the young Village people that Burroughs was in town, and they wanted to take a look at the mystery man of the underground, whom they knew only through his work. They sat there in tight, buzzing intimacy, the lank-haired chicks in boots and leather, the guys with long hair and shades, carrying copies of Nova Express, passports to the hip scene.

Burroughs appeared through yards of furled red curtains, in complete antithesis to the sartorial informality and East Village chic of his constituents. He removed his topcoat and felt hat, placed them carefully on top of a white chair, positioned his polished leather briefcase on the table in front of him, and eased his thin frame, encased in a three-piece suit, into a high-backed leather chair. Part of the effectiveness of his reading had to do with the contrast between his proper and conservative appearance and the improper and far-out content of his material. It had the incongruous effect of a classic Surrealist juxtaposition—the umbrella on the operating table, or a Mother Superior naked from the waist down. The response to the Burroughs blend of extravagant humor, read with a slightly nasal, slightly raspy midwestern twang by a man who looked as though he should have been addressing a convention of morticians, was unrestrained laughter. It was as though he was up there doing pratfalls instead of merely reading.

Burroughs then played a tape that was a collage of four themes—a plane crash over Jones Beach, an official dispatch from the American forces in Vietnam, the last words of Dutch Schultz, and a cops-and-robbers caper. “I do all the voices,” he explained. It was the audience’s first exposure to cut-ups, but they sat still for it. After about an hour, Burroughs got up, and without acknowledging the applause, gathered his belongings and vanished behind the red curtains, leaving some in the audience wondering whether they had really seen him or whether it had all been done with mirrors.

Burroughs was lionized. People wanted to press the flesh and get his autograph. Conrad Rooks, a young man who had come into a family fortune, wanted him to act in his avant-garde film with Jean-Louis Barrault and Ravi Shankar, whom Tim Leary called “the Liberace of India.” He did a period gangster sequence with black 1930 Cadillacs in which he and Rooks (who was starring as well as directing) mowed each other down with tommy guns firing blanks. Then Rooks fired his cameraman, Robert Frank, and hired some character he met in a bar who didn’t know his ass from a light meter and who underexposed the film, and they had to shoot the sequence over.

There was a kind of New York hostess in the sixties who collected the poets and artists of the counterculture. The reigning member of this species was probably Panna Grady, the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat, Tibor de Cholnoky, and an American heiress named Louise Marie St. John. Panna grew up on a country estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, came out as a debutante, and went to Wellesley. Then she transferred to Berkeley, where she was exposed to the San Francisco poetry renaissance, and met Allen Ginsberg. To the world of privilege and formality she preferred the world of the Beats, who were so unconstrained and outspoken and who revealed themselves with a candor that dispelled secretiveness, deception, and tactics.

In the sixties, Panna married a poet named Grady, who looked like an Irish bartender, moved to New York, and bought a spectacular apartment in the Dakota, where she threw memorable parties that brought the downtown people uptown. She had formed the idea of having a salon, after the eighteenth-century French tradition of Madame de Rambouillet, which would give her entrée to the art scene as a patroness and hostess. She loved art, which was pure and refreshed the heart. She gave and gave and all she asked in return was the company of artists. According to Brion Gysin, the Mick Jagger line “you think you’re the Queen of the Underground” in the Rolling Stones’ song “Dead Flowers” was about her.

When she met Burroughs, the mystery man of the underground, she was mesmerized and felt something akin to love. She loved his humor, his serious clowning, the way he stretched things until one had to laugh, his tight-lipped chortle, his endurance and lack of greed, his haunting and tranquil old-soul’s eyes, his decency and good manners, and his infallible insight into others. When she was with him, she knew that she was being seen attentively by an undistorting intelligence. He took her into account without passing judgment, without misunderstandings, quarrels, competition, domination, or crowding. She even liked his remote side, the side that left people alone and things unsaid. He never told you his troubles. And she liked his gentleman’s hat that seemed to top off the ghosts of his respectability.

In the spring of 1965 she gave a party in his honor that had all the elements of a cultural event. It was an incredible mingling of every New York scene, the Beats, the flower children, the famous and trying-to-be, the Warhol people, the eminent English novelist, the cliques and the claques, and the hostess’s uptown friends, peering down their noses at the fringed jackets, bandannas, beads, and long flowing skirts. So many crashed that Panna Grady had to tell the doorman not to let anyone else in. It was then that LeRoi Jones arrived and got into a tussle with a doorman, resulting in a broken arm—accounts differed as to whose. Another footnote to literary history was that Norman Mailer went up to Anthony Burgess and said, “Burgess, your last book was shit.” Burgess thought that, considering the amount of buggery in Mailer’s novels, he was being paid a compliment.

By the Edwardian mantelpiece in the music room stood the guest of honor, greeting well-wishers with uneffusive cordiality. Herbert Huncke complimented him on his new suit, and Burroughs said: “I’m going to leave very soon, I don’t like parties. But Panna invited me and I felt I should put in an appearance.” In the crowded main room there was a commotion. Word-of-mouth had it that an avant-garde poet had urinated in Mailer’s jacket pocket.

Panna Grady, who was by then a widow, entertained thoughts of marrying Burroughs. Just as some people want to marry into noble or royal families, she wanted to marry into Bohemia, at an appropriate level—and Burroughs was right up there. After all, he had been married before. She began to look for occasions to lure him, arranging dinners and parties as pretext. One evening, she invited him with Marshall McLuhan, Robert Lowell, and John Wain. Carried away with the ambience of the evening and the excellent wine, Burroughs in appreciation said something about going to live in Chile with Panna, but she knew he wasn’t serious. It was at this same dinner that Burroughs confronted John Wain for writing a vicious review of Naked Lunch. The cornered reviewer muttered, “The principal character has no interest in scenery.” “What do you mean?” Burroughs indignantly replied. “I am a connoisseur of scenery.”

Panna Grady continued to imagine a life together with Burroughs, where she could advance his career and become the Madame de Rambouillet of the counterculture, but Burroughs was evasive. Whenever togetherness was discussed, he pleaded “tired blood.” Herbert Huncke exploited her fondness for Burroughs by selling her information. He would tell her the latest Burroughs story, and she would slip him fifty or a hundred dollars, depending on the quality of the information. She became known as such a soft touch when it came to Burroughs that she was called “Pan of Gravy.” Burroughs himself never took a penny from Panna, and his privately held conviction was that there is no more miserable specimen than a homosexual who marries a woman for her money.

It was through Panna Grady that Burroughs met John Giorno, a young poet who would become a close friend and collaborator. In his own development, Giorno was a living artifact of the counterculture of the sixties. He came from an upper-middle-class family in Roslyn, Long Island, and after graduating from Columbia in 1958, he followed in the footsteps of his stockbroker father. He did the Wall Street trip for about four years and then met Andy Warhol and became his lover. Warhol was a foot fetishist who liked to lick Giorno’s toes and feet, which Giorno thought was pretty dismal. Warhol wasn’t famous yet, but was toying with the idea of making a movie. “Why don’t people make great movies when there are so many great things?” he said with his customary profundity. He bought a Bolex and started to film Giorno sleeping. He would set the lights and camera up and Giorno would go to sleep, usually drunk, and he would shoot for an hour or two. It took months to get what he wanted, a six-hour movie of Giorno asleep, a concept that made twisting and turning and snoring avant-garde.

Thanks to his inert performance (a part, he could rightly say, in which there was absolutely no acting), Giorno was launched in the downtown New York scene. At the Panna Grady party for Burroughs, he met Brion Gysin, who thought he looked in profile like Piero della Francesca’s portrait of the one-eyed Duke of Montefeltro. They became lovers and took about fourteen acid trips together in the Chelsea Hotel. When Brion was awakened by the chatter of maids in the hall, he covered their mouths with dollar bills, telling them it was “hush money.” The acid trips were completely sexual, and opened Giorno’s heart, so that he felt a deep emotional involvement. Brion was the first person who had ever given him a worldview, combining elements of esoteric knowledge, magic, and a beguilingly paranoid view of history. Giorno was hooked, totally enchanted—every day was a learning process. He was the adept and Brion was the teacher, and his teaching was transmitted like an arrow, from the heart to the heart.

Thinking he was in love with Brion, Giorno gave up his apartment on Ninth Street between Avenues C and D and followed him to Tangier in 1965. It was a magical time, a time of enchanting conversations and daily visits with Paul and Jane Bowles, who lived in Brion’s building. There was a theory that Jane had not had a stroke, but had been poisoned by her Moroccan friend Cherifa. One day in the fall of 1965 Paul stormed into Brion’s apartment and said, “Do you know what just happened? The parrot died.” Apparently, Jane had given the parrot some of her food and the parrot literally fell off its perch, legs up. Paul and Brion stood there facing each other and went through their poison routine: “Don’t you notice how pale Jane is getting?” “Whiter than white.” It was so convincing that Giorno found himself believing that Jane had been poisoned by a jealous Moroccan woman. He realized later that the poison theory was ludicrous, but at the time he was completely under Brion’s influence. It took him years to discern that you couldn’t take Brion with a grain of salt, you needed the entire shaker.

Brion took Giorno to Fez, where they dropped acid before visiting the tomb of the Merinides kings. There was a big hole in the ground, and the soil was still fresh, and Brion said, “It’s been looted.” All the looters had left were the bones. Giorno gathered up some tiny bones and broken bits of tile and pottery and wrapped them in his handkerchief. He saw himself as a saint, although occasionally he would float down and be a king. But he thought, “Being a king is not nearly so good as being a saint.” Brion got nervous because they were on the edge of a cliff and it was pitch black and a pack of howling dogs was coming closer. They stumbled down a path in the cliff, which was pockmarked with caves where bandits lived. Giorno was the Merinid king entering the royal city of Fez, past the dyers, knee deep in their vats, their bodies stained with the colors of their dyes, past the silk merchants, arms extended, offering bolts of embroidered cloth, past the silversmiths embossing the metal with their points and hammers, past the desert and mountain people, sandaled and turbaned.

That was the sort of endless magical thing that happened with Brion. Giorno thought it was wonderful, but after a while he saw that Brion was dissatisfied, which was his great fault. Nothing was ever good enough. Brion complained that Giorno was sponging off him, that he never talked about anything but money, and that he had arrived with thirty-two pieces of luggage, as if he was planning to stay forever. Also, it seemed to Giorno that any ongoing homosexual relationship was extremely difficult, and it was particularly so with Brion, who preferred Arab men. Giorno felt neglected. He had come to Tangier for a six-month trial, and it hadn’t worked out, so he left. In later years, when he thought of his affair with Brion, he thought of homosexual sex in general, and how the fag world had pioneered drugs and sex so that sex could be prolonged for hours, which led to multiple contacts and eventually to AIDS. As a Buddhist, Giorno had a theory that in the use of those sex drugs they had transgressed certain other realms, whose attendants had become angry, with a lethal anger from the spirit world.

When Giorno returned to New York in 1966 he became the lover of Robert Rauschenberg, and after that the lover of Jasper Johns, in 1969. But at a time when the counterculture was exploding and the shrapnel was flying, Jasper Johns was interested only in painting. He wanted to live a domestic married life where you saw no one and talked only about food. He refused to take any drugs, and he was a scold. It was like the horrible 1950s. He wasn’t interested in Woodstock and he wasn’t interested in the Vietnam demonstrations, and when he and Giorno discussed the student protest at Berkeley, he said, “I disapprove of it because it’s nothing but the transference of power.” “But Jasper, that precludes everything from changing,” Giorno said, and went his own way.

His itinerary took him in an increasingly political direction. In 1969 he thought up Dial-A-Poem, which was launched at the Museum of Modern Art. There were twelve lines with twelve poets and when you dialed you randomly got one of the twelve, reading a two-and-one-half minute poem. It was so popular that the museum kept it going for six months—they were getting 20,000 calls a day. Giorno made it political—he put on Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers and Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, and the Beat writer Diane Di Prima, describing how to make a Molotov cocktail. A poem on how to make a bomb was read on the day a real bomb exploded in the IBM building, and the New York newspapers ran stories that you could call David Rockefeller’s museum and find out how to build a bomb. The trustees panicked, and the program was discontinued. Giorno had presented a total of thirty poets, who had received a total of 800,000 calls. He often thought, imagine if he had patented Dial-A-Poem and collected royalties from the telephone company. As it was, they made millions copying his idea. They started a dial-a-something department, with everything from recipes to horoscopes.

Giorno’s next endeavor was as columnist for Culture Hero, a magazine edited by the conceptual artist Les Levine, which ran for five issues in 1969 and 1970. It was a distillation of the downtown scene, a mix of interviews and “heard-on-the-Rialto” type gossip. Giorno wrote a column called Vitamin G, in which he managed to offend almost everyone of note in the art world. His idea was that true art history, consisting of the talk exchanged among artists, was not being recorded. The way careers were being engineered, the reality of the artists’ lives, were kept in the dark. So Giorno revealed very personal items about the artists. When something true about someone appeared in print, he felt, an invaluable moment was created. So Giorno told what they liked to do in bed, and listed the cock sizes of his best-known lovers: Gysin, Burroughs, Warhol, Johns, and Rauschenberg. He ran items such as this: “Andy Warhol said to Jasper Johns, ‘Can I play with your cock as a work of art?’ Jasper should let Andy do it. Andy is light-fingered, as opposed to heavy-handed.” Les Levine told him, “You say things about people that even their worst enemies wouldn’t say.”

Giorno’s attempt to cut through the cant and pretense and preening self-importance of the New York art world brought him ostracism from his peers. He was identified as the enemy for reporting indiscretions. Feedback from the cock-size column included the following from Brion Gysin: “Vitamin Giorno poison pills came in the mail. Since you last measured my cock with your big mouth, cortisone has shrunk it still further. [Gysin was being treated with cortisone after a motorcycle accident]. Anything you like to print about my nipples or my anal sphincter now would not surprise me. You may yet be the Pepys of the pariah set. If you cannot be the first, be the last, the very last.”

Burned in the art world, Giorno turned to political protest with Abbie Hoffman. They taped radio programs that they sent to Radio Hanoi, which broadcast them to the American soldiers in South Vietnam. The programs were a mix of country-western, rock ’n’ roll, news, and antiwar messages. They made a total of thirteen tapes, each three hours long. When the first tapes were broadcast in the spring of 1971, Vice President Spiro Agnew dubbed Giorno and Hoffman the Hanoi Hannahs, would-be Tokyo Roses, and called for their arrest on charges of treason. Wow! thought Giorno, no one had been arrested for treason since Aaron Burr, and here he was in direct line. His lawyer assured him that under the Logan Act, which specified that treason could be committed only in a war declared by Congress, he would not be charged.

And yet he had an uneasy feeling that he was under surveillance. One day in October 1971, a package arrived, and when he opened it, two detectives who just happened to be there arrested him for possession of marijuana. He was jailed in the Tombs, where he slept on the floor in a cell with two spade junkies who had been there a month. The occupant of the adjacent cell had shoved a clothes-hanger wire up his arm and bled to death. One thing sure to radicalize any human being, Giorno reflected, was to spend twenty-four hours in an American prison. The next day Wyn Chamberlain raised his bail and Giorno was sprung. He left for India, where he stayed six months and became a Buddhist.

In 1965, the year Burroughs spent in New York, Giorno knew him mainly through Brion Gysin. Burroughs and Gysin were collaborating on a book called The Third Mind, and Giorno often had dinner with them after a day’s work. Burroughs also saw quite a lot of the painter David Budd, whom he had known in the Beat Hotel days. It was Budd who gave him a book called The Desperate Years, in which there was a passage quoting the strange stream-of-consciousness last words of the dying gangster Dutch Schultz. Fascinated by the text, which seemed to him a natural cut-up, Burroughs wrote a routine inspired by it. Panna Grady, still pursuing Burroughs and eager to be helpful, rented a theater where he could read his new work. She also arranged a meeting with Andy Warhol, who arrived at Burroughs’ loft carrying several bags. “What is that?” Burroughs asked, as they prepared to go out to dinner. “Recording equipment,” said Warhol. “Leave it there,” Burroughs said. He and Warhol did not hit it off. They went to a Chinese restaurant, where an uncouth friend of Warhol’s, as he finished his food, pushed his plates over onto another table where some Chinese people were eating. One thing Burroughs had no patience with was rude behavior, and he got up in the middle of dinner and walked out, with Panna Grady following.

Missing from the scene during Burroughs’ first months in New York was Allen Ginsberg, who was traveling in Europe and was that May deported from Czechoslovakia. One fine spring evening, Allen was strolling in the streets of Prague with a young couple when a man came up to him, shouted “Bouzerant!” (fairy), and knocked him down. Allen ran down the street, but the man knocked him down again, and suddenly five policemen were standing over him with lifted clubs. Uh-oh, Allen thought, now I’m going to get it, and started humming the mantra “Hari Om” to the pavement. But instead of hitting him, they took him to the police station. The man who had approached him was obviously a provocateur. After he was released, he noticed that one of his notebooks was missing. The next day, plainclothesmen found him in a restaurant and asked him to come to the station and get his notebook back. When he signed a paper identifying it as his, their faces went blank and they said, “And now we must inform you that we are turning your notebook over to the public prosecutor for closer examination, as a rapid survey of the contents indicates illegal writings.” Allen wondered what he might have written that might qualify as illegal writing. Maybe it was the line “I lie in bed with teenage boys afraid of the red police.” A few days later he was detained again and told, “Due to many complaints about your presence in Prague from parents and educators who disapprove of your sexual theories, we are shortening your visa and you will leave Czechoslovakia today.” Detectives took him to his hotel, watched him pack, and put him on a plane to London.

When Allen got back to New York he told Burroughs about his adventures. Burroughs reflected that Czechoslovakia was not that different from New York, where there seemed to be rampant drug hysteria. You could get arrested just for talking about drugs. He began to feel uncomfortable, particularly after Huncke reported that a narcotics agent had approached him, asking him to set up Burroughs and Ginsberg. Allen went straight to Mayor John Lindsay and complained that distinguished writers were the victims of a police conspiracy. Also, the political scene was oppressive, with the “Why not bomb Peking now?” sort of thing. Burroughs wrote Ian Sommerville on July 28: “I have missed you a great deal. Life in America is really a bore. Nothing here really, I just stay in my loft and work.” He decided in August that the New York climate was uncongenial and that he had better head back to Europe. He had a lease on the Centre Street loft, but a young painter friend, David Prentice, promised to look after it in his absence and find a sublet.

Just before he left, who should show up but Paul and Jane Bowles on one of their rare visits to the United States. They had been in Florida visiting Jane’s mother and stepfather, and reported that it was a terrible place, giving the impression of predigested existence. Everything was softened up and decayed, including the people. It was a land of sprinklers, lawns, and fancy trees. When a car went by it had a boat trailing after it.

It was all too obvious to Burroughs that Jane was not well. Her speech was halting and she dragged her feet, and the two of them were infuriatingly indecisive. It took them half an hour of soul-searching to get out of their room in the Chelsea and reach the bar for a drink. Paul saw himself at the center of an ordered universe, Burroughs reflected, and never blamed himself for anything. When Jane had her stroke he agreed to shock therapy, which should never be given if there was any suspicion of organic brain damage. But Paul had said, “You pay doctors to tell you what to do and you have to do it then, don’t you?” Paul was a genius at keeping his actual motivations concealed from everyone else, and Burroughs was convinced that one of his motivations, on a conscious level, was the ruination of Jane. But all this he kept to himself as he watched them that evening, Paul impassive and solicitous, and Jane clearly brain-damaged, a blurred and impoverished travesty of her true self.

At Gatwick airport in early September 1965, Burroughs again had trouble at customs. They wanted to limit his stay to one month instead of the usual three. He went to Lord Goodman, who personally took his passport to the Home Secretary to have it amended, and who told him, “Of course, dear boy, come as often as you like and stay as long as you please.” London was gray, and Burroughs was busy taping street sounds and doctoring the tapes and playing them back on location. Hearing from David Prentice that Huncke was interested in renting his loft with a painter friend, Burroughs wrote: “There are no more undesirable tenants than Huncke or anyone he plans to live with and for your own protection and mine lock him out and bar the door. If he gets a foothold you will have the law in bugging everyone. He is not only a junky but a thief, strong both against the deed, in the words of the immortal bard. The raven himself is harsh who croaks the fatal entrance of Huncke under my battlement.”

Forced to leave England at the end of three months because of his visa, Burroughs spent the holiday season in Tangier, taking an apartment on the calle Goya. On Christmas day, Brion Gysin dropped by with his Moroccan friend Targuisti and a load of wood for his fireplace. “Heard the Christmas news?” Brion asked. “Jay Haselwood just dropped dead at the Parade.” The owner of the Parade Bar, the genial Kentuckian, the Tangier fixture everyone liked, had died of a heart attack.

Burroughs went to the funeral on December 30 at St. Andrew’s Church. It was quite a turnout, the tout-Tanger, with all the cooks and waiters who had worked for him over the years, and the old biddies that Jay used to have lunch with, and the patrons of the Parade, from the beau monde to the naughty boys, and the shameless moochers who were always cadging drinks. “This man was loved by people in all walks of life,” said the minister. Apparently, Burroughs was told at the funeral, Haselwood had come out of the bathroom with sweat streaming down his face, lain down on the floor in front of the bar, and died. One of the shameless moochers had taken advantage of the confusion to steal some money out of someone’s purse, the very same one who at the funeral came up to him and said: “Oh, Bill, it’s so nice to see you. Could you lend me 1,000 francs?” As they followed the coffin to the grave, Burroughs reflected that it was the end of an era. Gone with Jay Haselwood was the old Tangier, with its colorful characters and live-and-let-live attitude. Now it was like every other place—the government had both feet in your business.

That evening, Burroughs went to Paul Bowles’s for dinner. Paul had missed the funeral. He was looking after Jane, whose anxiety and depression had been aggravated by the news of Haselwood’s death. She was under a lot of medication and drinking too much, a dangerous combination. Burroughs arrived immaculately dressed, all in black with a tightly furled umbrella. As he peeled off his gloves, he said, “Well, Paul, you missed a very enjoyable funeral.” Paul wondered how he should take the remark. Was it said seriously, in the sense that some funerals were better than others, or was it black humor, or was it “we were happy to see the end of that one”? One never knew with Bill.

By the end of 1965, Burroughs had finished what he called his “mythology for the space age,” a trilogy of books made up mainly of overflow material from Naked Lunch, with quite a lot of cut-up material thrown in. The Soft Machine was published by Olympia in 1961 and by Grove in 1966. The Ticket That Exploded was brought out in 1962 by Olympia and in 1967 by Grove, which also published Nova Express in 1964, Olympia having by then gone out of business.

All three books were concerned with the struggle between controllers and those who want to throw off control. The virus power is still entrenched. The consumer is an addict. The old mythologies have broken down and we are dealing here with a space-age war between the Nova Police and the Nova Mob. The Nova Mob is a band of aliens from outer space who control human beings by assuming the form of a parasitic virus. They are fought by the Nova Police, the good guys, who disappear once their task is done, unlike other police forces.

All of this draws heavily from Burroughs’ reading in science fiction, but is filtered through his various preoccupations, such as the Mayan civilization, scientology, and a Reichian view of sex, as well as through his addiction and past experiences in Tangier and South America. The result is a fantasy world peopled with cartoon figures rather than characters, and dreamlike episodes rather than a plot, but lacking the compression and urgency of Naked Lunch. After all, this was material left over from Naked Lunch, and it has a bit of that warmed-over flavor. Like any sequel, it doesn’t have the shock value the original had. The first man to jump off the Empire State Building in a parachute makes the six o’clock news. The second man walks away unnoticed, and can’t even get himself arrested. Other problems were the numerous patches of cut-up writing, breaking the compact of intelligibility with the reader, and obsessively repetitive homoerotic passages.

Allen Ginsberg asked Burroughs: “Well, how can you expect anybody to read through all of this if you don’t make big, categorical distinctions? . . . It’s like reading one large series of prose-poems that have no end.”

“No, no, no,” Burroughs said, “it’s quite comprehensible and as accessible as any book you pick up at the airport. People are demanding less and less in the way of plot and structure, I find. So I don’t think there’s any difficulty in understanding.” In fact, all three books demand a degree of concentration hard to sustain. The Soft Machine, which consists of seventeen routines, opens with autobiographical reminiscences of junky days, as a way of grounding the narrative in memory: Burroughs rolling drunks on the subway with Phil White (the Sailor). Scenes of small-time pushing. Then the scene shifts to Morocco: “Got up and fixed in the sick dawn flutes of Ramadan.” Hearing of Bill Garver’s death in Mexico: “The consul would give me no information other than place of burial in the American cemetery. . . . He gave me an alarm clock ran for a year after his death.” Kiki’s death in Madrid: “This frantic Cuban fruit finds Kiki with a novia and stabs him with a kitchen knife in the heart.” The Demerol cure in the Jewish hospital in Tangier.

There follows a passage in which it is made abundantly clear that sex is dirty: “Made it three times slow fuck on knees in the stink sewage looking at the black water.” Sex is also a way to occupy and take over someone’s body.

Then we have “The Trak Reservation” (trak means “thank you” in Danish), a satire on capitalist-consumer societies, and the introduction of Bradley-Martin, inventor of the double-cross and leader of the Nova Mob, who says, “Don’t care myself if the whole fucking shithouse goes up in chunks—I’ve sat out Novas before—I was born in a Nova.”

In “The Mayan Caper,” Burroughs shows how the Mayan priest-rulers controlled the masses through the calendar, and describes “the transfer operation,” a way of moving into someone else’s body during an orgasm-by-hanging scene.

The book ends with its best passage, Burroughs’ version of the creation myth, called “Cross the Wounded Galaxies.” This is not the biblical Genesis, with its reassuring deity creating order out of chaos, but creation as it actually must have felt to the first upright beings, a thing of total fear, life as disorder. Millions of years of evolution are compressed in a few pages of powerful images: “Torn we crawled out of the mud. Faces and bodies covered with purple sex-flesh. . . . When we came out of the mud we had names.” Man discovers language, “the talking sickness.” Man discovers the need of others: “And the other did not want to touch me because of the white-worm thing inside but no one could refuse if I wanted and ate the fear-softness in other men.” Man discovers war: “Once we caught one of the hairy men with our vine nets and tied him over a slow fire and left him there until he died.” Man discovers methods of survival: “Sitting naked at the bottom of a well, the cool mud of evening touched our rectums. We share a piece of armadillo gristle, eating it out of each other’s mouths. Above us a dry husk of insect bodies along the stone well wall and thistles over the well mouth against green evening sky.” The situation is one of permanent horror, but there is always the possibility of escape to another planet: “Migrants of ape in gasoline crack of history, explosive bio-advance out of space to neon.” “Cross the Wounded Galaxies” is so strong that it gives the impression of having been written by a man in a trance, who saw beyond what the rest of us see.

Like The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded opens with an autobiographical sequence, a reminiscence of Burroughs’ trip to South America with Eugene Allerton, but Allerton has now become an enemy, underlining the futility of love: “Basically he was completely hard and self-seeking and thought entirely in terms of position and advantage—an effective but severely limited intelligence. . . . But then who am I to be critical few things in my own past I’d just as soon forget.” This is followed by a parody of love done through popular song titles: “Who’s Sorry Now . . . Do I Love You . . . You Were Meant for Me.”

The nature of the Nova conspiracy is finally described: “Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts. . . . This is done by dumping on the same planet life forms with incompatible conditions of existence. . . .” One of these incompatible forms, being, of course, the opposite sex.

Burroughs postulates “Operation Other Half,” which imprisons human life in conflict and duality, and counters it with “Operation Rewrite,” in which binary thinking is dismantled. Such is the power of writing, he says, that it can change the conditions of our lives. He rejects the conventional solution: “Why don’t I work for your uncle’s company? Work for a company and what do they give you? . . . Member of the country club . . . house and garden . . . a wife . . . heart attack at fifty-five . . . no thanks.”

And yet Burroughs has gone to the other extreme and become someone who sees nothing but the menace of life, an apocalyptic chronicler, a soured Utopian. The book ends with nostalgia for a lost childhood: “Stale dreams Billy . . . boy I was who never would be now . . . I lost him long ago.”

In Nova Express, the most didactic of the three books, Burroughs has a tendency to lecture the reader: “Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dreams? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours?” In other words, the battle between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police is analogous to the battle men should be waging to regain their freedom from control groups. “The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. . . . To retake their Universe of Fear, Death, and Monopoly.” Women as a controlling force are again excoriated: “You cunts constitute a disposal problem in the worst form there is and raise the nastiest whine ever heard anywhere: ‘Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?’ Why don’t you go back to Venus and fertilize a forest?”

The cut-up passages are more frequent here, sometimes as a parody of newswriting, with its claim to objectivity and “just the facts, ma’am.” “Attorney-General for Fear announced yesterday the discovery that cries of nepotism might ‘form a new mineral damaging to the President.’” “Police juice and the law are no cure for widespread public petting in chow lines, the Soviet Union said yesterday.” Another purpose of the cut-ups is to show that nobody owns the language, and there are many references to the words of other authors, among them E. E. Cummings and T. S. Eliot.

As usual the reviews were a mixed bag. Reviewers who were themselves writers of talent tended to appreciate Burroughs more than literary critics.

Nor were people at Grove Press too happy at the direction his work was taking. After Naked Lunch, sales slumped badly because the trilogy was inaccessible to the general reader, and appealed only to unconditional Burroughs fans. Dick Seaver, his editor, tried to tell him as gently as possible that it was madness to perpetuate the cup-up method, that it was hurting his sales and his reputation, that his writing was too good to get stuck in an arbitrary groove. But Burroughs could theorize for hours on the validity of cut-ups, how they went back to the Surrealist tradition, and how he was convinced that there were many important connections he could not make in the linear method of writing, which he could only find in juxtaposition and happenstance. “Sure, it’s interesting,” Seaver said, “but don’t think of it as a life’s work.” “Anyone can use scissors,” Burroughs replied, “but some can use them better than others. . . . It takes a master.”

Seaver could not help thinking that that kind of narrow and obsessive focus was related to drugs. It was like Alex Trocchi, doing nothing for years but carving tiny wooden sculptures. Making cut-ups was just another aspect of the drugged state of mind. Also, he had this mountain of material that he didn’t know what to do with, so he cut it up and recycled it. And yet the feeling at Grove was that they would continue to publish what he wrote, for he was one of their flagships. It would be a mistake to turn him down. All they could do was try and steer him away from the cut-up method.