17

THE LONDON YEARS

1966-1973

WHEN BURROUGHS RETURNED TO London in January 1966, there was a murder on the train from Gatwick airport, which he saw as an ominous sign. He settled into the Hotel Rushmore, at 11 Trebovir Road, Earl’s Court. He was reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and wondered how it could be a bestseller. My God, what a bore it was, with its dull victims, their church suppers and 4-H clubs, and even duller killers. It must be that someone pressed a button somewhere and people bought any tripe at all. He was glad to see a full page of disfavor in The Observer, which said that Capote had deliberately let the killers hang, refusing to pull strings and release psychiatric testimony, in order to sell his crappy book.

In Burroughs’ absence, Ian Sommerville, now twenty-six, had taken up with a younger man from his hometown of Darlington, Alan Watson, whose parents were pastry cooks. Alan was small and blond and swishy, and liked to camp it up. He worked in the canteen at Scotland Yard, where, if bought enough pints, he would dance on the tables. When he walked down Jermyn Street, where they were building the Cavendish Hotel, he sashayed past the construction crews in the scaffolding with one hand on his hip, blowing kisses with his other hand, and laughing at their gibes.

Burroughs considered himself the victim of a classic case of alienation of affection. It was entirely his fault for not having taken Ian to New York. He had relinquished and then tried to reclaim, and had no grounds to reclaim. While he was away, Ian had found someone he was attracted to, and it was futile for Burroughs to protest, or show his jealousy. He was in the humiliating position of having to put up with Watson, and hoping it would blow over. Sexual desire was so fleeting. There was a time, in Tangier, when Ian had wanted him but he wasn’t interested. And now that Burroughs wanted Ian, Ian didn’t respond. It happened very seldom that both wanted it—it just didn’t coincide. Sexually, Burroughs reflected, he had always got it wrong.

Ian was riding high, having met the Beatles, who set him up in a recording studio. Paul McCartney wanted to launch a “Spoken Word” label, which would release a monthly record, like an avant-garde monthly magazine, with bits of poetry, interviews, and experimental music. Ringo Starr had an empty flat on Montague Square, a nouveau-riche sort of place with purple silk wallpaper, where Ian kept the expensive Beatle-bought equipment. Ian operated the studio like a crusty governess, with little supervision from the Beatles, who had their own problems.

Burroughs was at first glad that Ian had something to do, and a chance to make money. He marveled at the studio, which had equipment to rival the BBC’s. He went by a few times and met Paul, who played the acetate of the Rubber Soul album for him. Burroughs just sat there nodding and not saying anything, and McCartney thought he hadn’t liked it. What was bothering Burroughs was not the music, but that he had begun to see the recording studio as a conspiracy to alienate Ian from him even further.

Now, whenever he asked Ian to record something for him, Ian did it grudgingly and reluctantly. And Miss Alan Watson was always swishing around the studio, spraying perfume and fixing her hair, and fleeing with her bird-brain to cunt headquarters. He had to face the fact: Ian was married to a cunt. In May, when Ian and Alan went to Paris for a holiday, he told himself that he had never been so glad to see two people walk out of his life. He would refuse to see Ian again as long as he had a wife sticking to him like a barnacle. The trouble with Ian was that he had a snobbish, celebrity-loving side that Alan Watson brought out. Miss Watson was an exaggerated version of Ian’s worst traits, the flighty side, easily impressed by names.

In July, Burroughs moved into a flat in Anthony Balch’s building, at 8 Duke Street, a good location, near Piccadilly Circus on one side and Pall Mall on the other. Ian and Alan were broke, the largesse of the Beatles having come to an end, and in August asked if they could move in. Alan would do the cooking. Burroughs, out of weakness, agreed, initiating living conditions that were sure to make him miserable.

He had no sympathy with his own behavior. He knew perfectly well that he would find it difficult to live in close quarters on a day-to-day basis with Miss Watson while holding back his hostility. He was disgusted with himself. He felt that he was rolling around in his weakness like a dog rolling in manure. He had completely lost the upper hand. Brion Gysin told him, “Well, if you’re going to let someone walk all over you . . .” Which was exactly what he was doing. He should have said, “If it’s Alan you want, take him and get out of here.” But he was too devoted to Ian to do that. Brion had always told him that the barking of dogs had a meaning, and on a short trip to Tangier he listened to the dogs and heard them bark “Boss, Bosses, Boss Bill”—the dogs were reminding him that he had lost the boss position.

Not that it was all bad. Alan was cordial and flexible, and cooked some excellent meals. But he played Maria Callas records from morning to night. “There goes that graveyard howl again,” Burroughs said. Alan could tell when Burroughs was annoyed; he would make a nervous gesture through his hair and purse his mouth disdainfully. Then he would lock himself up in his room.

Nor did it seem to Alan that Ian and Burroughs got along all that well. They were like an old married couple, either bickering or silent. Ian was high-strung, overreacting to little things. When Burroughs knocked over a teacup, Ian said, “Oh, really, William, that’s too much.” Ian complained that Burroughs was a creature of habit. He had to have his first drink at six, and then he was drunk by eight. Ian did not think that was the way for an important writer to live,, and told Alan, “I am not going to waste the rest of my young life on that old drunk.” And yet when Burroughs went on the wagon, Ian stayed away. It was as though he was put out at having lost his major reason for complaint.

One sunny September day, Alan Watson went to Hampton Court and took some cassettes along. As he sat on a bench sunning himself, he played one of the cassettes and was horrified to hear his own voice being mimicked by Burroughs, saying things he often said. It was so spooky that he took the cassette off the machine and flung it into the canal. Burroughs had put a curse on Alan Watson, hoping it would make him leave. Later, when he thought about it, Burroughs told himself that no curse originating in lust and anger could ever work. The only curses that worked were those that were done with real detachment. What he had done to Miss Watson was rotten weeds . . . utterly indefensible.

In September 1966, Burroughs’ attention was distracted from the Ian-Alan situation when he got the news that Billy had vanished. On his return from Tangier in 1964, Billy had struck his Palm Beach friends as completely changed. His closest female friend, Berteina Barnum, found him hurt and bitter and withdrawn. He was hurt, she surmised, because in Tangier he had realized that his father was unable to take care of him. While this had remained untested, there was still hope. But now that he had actually gone and tried it, the illusion was lost. Billy became so difficult that his grandparents sent him to boarding school in the fall of 1964.

About the only place that would have him was the Green Valley School, in central Florida, outside Orange City, “Home of Pure Water.” Occupying an old monastery, the school was run by the Reverend George Von Hilsheimer, a tall, clean-cut, energetic fellow with what the army calls “command presence.” Hilsheimer was a licensed Baptist minister with a doctorate in philosophy from the Humanistic Psychology Institute in San Francisco. A disciple of A. S. Neill’s Summerhill, he founded Green Valley as one of those noble educational experiments of the sixties, a school that kids would regard as a great experience rather than a prison sentence. He told the students not to call him “Sir,” so they called him “George the Bear” and “Revvy Baby.” In his office there was a framed statement called “Winners and Losers”:

A winner always has a program.

A loser always has an excuse.

A winner says let me do it for you.

A loser says that’s not my job.

And so on.

There was a gap between aspiration and reality, however, and Green Valley soon came to be known as a school of last resort for messed-up kids—dopers, hippies, and out-and-out crazies. When Billy arrived there in the fall of 1964 he struck the Reverend Von Hilsheimer as a mature-looking seventeen-year-old—you wouldn’t card him at a bar. In turn, Billy found Von Hilsheimer larger than life and compassionate. Billy was popular with girls, and one day Von Hilsheimer told him, “Goddamn it, Burroughs, I started this school so I could get laid, not you.” His general attitude to students having affairs was: “If I know about it, it becomes my business, so be discreet. As far as I’m concerned, privacy is the basis of all morality.”

It did not take Billy long to realize that some of the Green Valley students were seriously disturbed. Around Easter of 1965, an eighteen-year-old boy named Nigel, recently released from a mental hospital, broke into the gun locker, removed a 9mm pistol, wrapped himself up in a sleeping bag, put the pistol in his mouth, and blew his brains out. Assigned to clean Nigel’s room the next morning, Billy saw a piece of skull with hairs attached to it that was stuck to the wall, and the splattered crater the bullet had made next to it.

Billy had this on his conscience: The night in January 1965 when Laura called to tell him that Mote was dead, her husband, his father’s father, he did not go at once to the school superintendent and say he needed a car, right away. It would have taken him four hours to be at her side. Crippled by inertia, he hadn’t bothered.

With Mote dead, Laura at seventy-seven was short of money. She didn’t see how she was going to pay for Billy’s tuition. But this time Burroughs was able to help, and his grateful mother wrote: “I never had to worry about money before, and now all I want is to get Billy educated. Mote always managed the family finances and I suppose he tried to keep me from worrying. . . . Mote and I always talked things over—and it is hard to plan alone.”

Billy started his second year at Green Valley in the fall of 1965, and it was not long afterward that he started taking drugs. One day the school’s business manager came to see the headmaster, Ron Nowicki, and said, “We have an unusually large bill from the pharmacy this month.” They asked for an itemized bill, which listed numerous purchases of a drug containing paregoric. It turned out that Billy’s roommate had been to see a doctor for an ear infection and had obtained a prescription for a painkiller. Every week Billy and his roommate duplicated the prescription, going to the pharmacy in Orange City, charging the medicine to the school, cooking it up in their room, and shooting the paregoric. They were signing a staff member’s name to the scrips, but Nowicki obtained their descriptions from the pharmacist and had their room searched. The syringes were found in the tone arm of their record player.

Billy was not dismissed from the school. Von Hilsheimer believed in giving kids a second chance and did not want to lose any tuition-paying students. That summer of 1966, having graduated from Green Valley, and hanging around Palm Beach, with his grandmother increasingly lost in a world of her own, he started taking speed. In mid-September, he told Laura he was going on a camping trip, and vanished. On September 19, Burroughs’ brother, Mort, wrote him that Laura was in a panic. She would not eat or sleep or leave the house, she just sat by the phone waiting. This was a new low in irresponsibility. Obviously, Billy could no longer live with his grandmother. At the same time, he was nineteen and not ready for the world. He should go to his father in London, who should get him started in life. Not being wanted was a large part of his present trouble.

Billy had hitchhiked to New York, where he showed a real propensity for trouble, managing to get himself busted twice in two weeks. The first time, at the end of September, he was taking speed with friends in a hotel when detectives crashed in, waving guns, and made him stand against the wall with his hands up. He was taken to the Brooklyn House of Detention, where he killed time in his cell, as the guards did their rounds, yelling “On the Gate,” meaning that the inmates had to stand at the front of their cells. He called Allen Ginsberg, who posted bail. The bondsman brought him two hot dogs and a glass of milk. When he went by Allen’s to say thanks, Allen said, “For God’s sake, be careful.” Billy paid no attention, and went out looking for more speed. At his first court hearing, Allen provided a lawyer, and he was released on grounds of illegal search and seizure.

Then, on October 8, 1966, he was arrested with six others in a Bleecker Street pad where police found opium, marijuana, barbiturates, and guns. It was pure bad luck, thought Billy. Too embarrassed to call Allen again, he was taken to the Tombs, where a cellmate told him: “When the cart comes, grab the meat out of a couple of sandwiches and stick it in yours. They don’t watch so good.” Allen found out where he was and again bailed him out, asking, “Why don’t you have the sense to stay out of places like that?” and again he was released for illegal search and seizure. He wrote his father asking for $300 to pay the lawyer, adding: “These fiascos are part of an education for me. Because of many things in the past, I’ve had to see just a bit of despair, and to experience a lot of mental fuckup. All this, not in any attempt to be like you, but rather to become able to understand my father. In Tangier, I was too afraid and had to leave.” And yet it seemed that Billy was copying his father’s drug-taking and criminality, but without his father’s core of discipline and sense of survival. Perhaps it was a role-model situation: If your father was Pete Rose you were likely to take up baseball, and if your father was William Burroughs you were likely to take up drugs.

Allen Ginsberg didn’t know what to make of Billy. He had Joan’s dome forehead and Bill’s gray eyes and grayish complexion and very fine brown hair—there was no trace of Whitey that he could see. (For there were those who said that Joan’s gangster lover Whitey was Billy’s real father.) He was intelligent but vague, and usually in need of a bath. He had called Allen to be rescued, and then he had disappeared, and then he had called to be rescued again, and then he had disappeared again. Allen tracked him down to a grungy place on Avenue B, and urged him to leave town before he got arrested a third time.

Burroughs agreed with his brother that Billy should join him in London, and plans were made to that effect. He had no idea what he would do with Billy, or how he would fit into the already complicated ménage with Ian and Alan Watson. Matters had improved in that department, however. His silly jealousy had evaporated, and he found himself actually liking Alan, who was tidy and willing and who fixed his breakfast each morning, and made elaborate dinners such as wild duck à l’orange. If Billy arrived, he would try to find another flat for Ian and Alan in the building.

But each time Billy was set to fly to London something came up. One time he said he was sick from Benzedrine withdrawal. The next time he had a really bad tooth. Then, in mid-November, he was arrested in West Palm Beach as he was leaving Henry’s drugstore, where he had tried to fill a forged scrip for Desoxyn, which was prescribed as an antidepressant. The police found some pills under the front seat of his car. As Billy put it, “When you want speed, you’re ready to walk ten miles and pose for skin pix.”

Mort wrote Burroughs that their poor mother was at her wit’s end. It was going to be a pretty messy thing for a lone old lady to handle. If they didn’t get Billy away from her it was going to kill her. She had aged years in the last few months. Billy had been arraigned and was out on bail and his trial was set for August 1967. Mort was afraid Billy would be in another jam before August, and then things would be twice as bad. “I think the issue is clear,” Mort said. “Either take care of him or write him off—without help he will never make it.”

What was wrong with his son, Burroughs wondered? My God, three busts in a few months was too much. “I am convinced,” he wrote his mother, “it is the difficulty of young men today, arising from the fact that he does not have anything to do or any goals which have meaning for him. I am ready to give any amount of time and effort to find something for him to do.”

In fact, however, Burroughs was equivocating. He did not want to go to Palm Beach. He would do almost anything to avoid it, writing his mother on November 25 a classic example of mealy-mouthed reasoning: “I feel that for me to come to Palm Beach at this point would be unwise for several reasons. First of course is the question of expenses. Air fare plus living, it means a thousand dollars more or less . . . that much less money to provide for Billy. For that amount Billy could be treated for a week in a nursing home with the best care. . . . What concerns me is that (because of my past record) I am not a suitable guardian for Billy. In short my presence in Palm Beach might do more harm than good to Billy’s case. Whereas if I am not there questions are less likely to arise. Does Mort know about the situation? If he could come down for a few days that would be much more to the point.”

The last time Mort had “come down for a few days” was when Burroughs had shot his wife and he had gone to Mexico to retrieve Billy. Mort now made it clear that he was through pulling his brother’s chestnuts out of the fire. “Not that I doubt my own ability to make a good impression on any unprejudiced person,” Burroughs continued. “However, the narcotics department is completely prejudiced. They say once an addict always an addict and they discount the possibility of cure. . . . I will almost certainly have trouble with them if I return. They told me when I came in last time I was subject to fine and imprisonment for not registering with the department when I left the U.S.”

His son was bereft, facing criminal charges and a jail sentence in a state that treated drug users harshly, needing a father’s presence and assistance, and here was Burroughs hemming and hawing and ducking his responsibility. He did not give the real reason for his reluctance, which was that he had a habit. If he went to Palm Beach, where what he needed was not obtainable, he would go through withdrawal. But as repeated pleas arrived from his mother and his brother, he had to bite the bullet. Billy was depressed, his mother was unable to cope, and Mort was unwilling to be a surrogate father. Burroughs finally decided to go to Palm Beach over Christmas 1966 and do what he could.

He arrived in the midst of a situation that was far from merry. Billy’s prospects were as bad as could be. There were three felony counts, and he could not leave the country without posting some outrageous bond. His case was coming up before one of the most severe judges in Florida, Russell MacIntosh, who automatically handed down the maximum sentence to everyone who appeared before him. His mother was hallucinating and calling the police, saying she heard voices. She was driving him round the bend with her continual fretting and loss of memory. He had to explain some points to her fifty times. Friends of the family had faded into thin air. There were no servants and no car. The house was in a state of unbelievable disorder and, Burroughs was sure, quite literally haunted. On New Year’s Day, 1967, his mother fell and broke her wrist. Burroughs called Dr. Murphy, the family doctor, who was in trouble for having prescribed Benzedrine to Billy, and he wouldn’t give Laura an injection, so Burroughs had to take her to the hospital.

Burroughs wasn’t feeling that great himself, having arrived with the tail end of a tincture of opium habit plus various other disabilities—pain and tension in the back of the neck, swelling in the glands at the side of the neck with a high fever, and swelling in the groin. Which did not improve his mood, nor did Billy’s incredible carelessness, for Burroughs found empty paregoric bottles and syringes all over the house.

“You’re no help at all,” he exploded. “And Mother is calling me Mort, and asking me to move things that aren’t there, and calling me by any name that comes to mind. And I can’t get a decent night’s sleep in that back room, and when I do, it’s all nightmares. All this on top of those stupid cops is frustrating.”

Billy, however, found his father a pleasure to have around. He’d been there. He understood. He gave Billy the gospel according to Burroughs: Dress well, be punctual, speak when spoken to. Be attentive and not impatient. If a small mind with power began to feel inferior, there would be all hell to pay. Above all, there was no such thing as a nice cop. The cop mentality was, “If you’re not guilty, how come you’re bleeding?”

Burroughs went to see the lawyer his mother had found, and saw himself through the lawyer’s eyes: this seedy, shifty, addict father . . . No wonder the son . . . He heard the lawyer say, quite distinctly, “Lousy father.” The lawyer, however, thought there might be a way to get the charges dropped. He knew someone in the district attorney’s office who was willing to make a deal. The deal was that they would place Billy on probation if he agreed to take the cure at the federal hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. Judge MacIntosh went along, imposing four years’ probation, with every restriction in the book. But it was certainly better than standing trial, particularly since Billy, though off speed, was still taking paregoric, morphine, and Dilaudid.

In early February, 1967, Burroughs took Billy to Lexington. They flew together as far as Atlanta, but Billy, who was afraid of planes, was in a panic, despite a large dose of tranquilizers, and rented a car the rest of the way. Billy told himself that he had to get over this fixation about flying, but there was nothing down there but air, man, and what if the pilot didn’t get laid last night and decides to take the whole shitload with him. As he waited in his hotel room for Billy to arrive, Burroughs was overcome with sadness. Tears streamed from his eyes. He saw Billy’s future spread out before him, like a canvas covered with meaningless scratches, and he knew that it would end in tragedy, and that he was powerless to change it. He dried his eyes, thinking, “Crying is nothing to be ashamed of.” The next day, when he and Billy presented themselves at the hospital, the admittance clerk looked at father and son and asked, “Which one of you is checking in here?” He knew an old junky when he saw one.

By mid-March, Burroughs was back in London, relieved to have escaped from all the family horrors. He was even glad to see Alan Watson. He started a new novel, The Wild Boys, but the flat was too crowded to work, and in May he left for Marrakesh, where he stayed with a friend from Memphis, Bill Willis, who was decorating a house for John Paul Getty, Jr. The only trouble was that Getty’s checks kept bouncing. Marrakesh he found confining. The social circuit was too small. You kept seeing the same people over and over. The poverty and the begging were more obtrusive. The heat was oppressive. You had to close the shutters in the morning to keep the cool air in. When Willis sent the servant girl out to buy potatoes at one-thirty in the afternoon, she refused to go. What kind of respect did they expect from their servants, when they dragged in every boy off the streets? The only thing he liked about Marrakesh was Mr. Verygood, who came to the door each day with his hashish cookies. After a month, he moved to Tangier, writing through from 10:00 A.M. to dinnertime in his room in the Atlas Hotel, copiously supplied with majoun, and making notes while he ate dinner. From London there were occasional communications from Ian, a postcard that said “gloom doom spoon moon love Ian,” and a note reporting “that the city makes its own weather is confirmed. Clouds hang heavy and low over London. We carry on.”

Returning to London in July, Burroughs was greeted with another crisis, but one that mercifully did not require his presence in Palm Beach. His mother, it was clear, was losing her mind. She had appeared to be the stronger of his parents, while actually her degree of reliance on Mote had been complete, and without his steadying hand she was distressed and alone. Billy was back at Green Valley, and she constantly worried over whether he was complying with the conditions of his probation. Her Palm Beach fair-weather friends had deserted her. Ellis, the black gardener, would come in for tea out of kindness and sit there with a little white cup in his huge hand, finding her alone on the pink couch, white as whalebone, thin as a blade, one-breasted from cancer, talking about ghosts.

When Ellis left she drank cocktails and hallucinated, seeing drunken gauchos playing cards in her living room. She saw men coming out of the television set and sitting on her bed. She didn’t understand how the men got in and out, disappearing so quickly. She called the police, asking them to chase the little people out, and blaming her neighbors for sending them around. Several times a day, she called Mort and Miggy in St. Louis. Dr. Murphy said it was hardening of the arteries.

The house was up for sale, but Bob Bissett, the real estate man, called Mort to say he couldn’t possibly sell it as long as she was in it, because when he was showing clients around they were very definitely put off by her remarks about the little people in the corner playing bingo. The only solution, Mort and Miggy wrote Burroughs, was to move her to St. Louis and put her in a nursing home. But Mort didn’t have the guts to do it unless she was willing, and one day she thought it was a good idea and the next day she changed her mind. You had to plan ahead to get into these places, however, and Mort put her name on the waiting list. The cost was rather high, but no worse than living alone, and her condition was bound to improve in a place where she could talk to real people instead of imaginary ones for a change.

In the fall of 1967, Mort and Miggy moved her to a St. Louis nursing home at twenty-five dollars a day. Mort wrote Burroughs that he would pay for it but wanted Burroughs to handle Billy’s financial needs, for Billy had begun to call him from Green Valley to beg for money. Billy was back at Green Valley as a teacher’s assistant—that school for kooks where maybe you could get some schooling if you were enterprising enough to hunt up a teacher and ask for it. Mort couldn’t help him—he didn’t even like the kid.

Finally the house was sold, and Laura was barely able to sign the deed. Mort had to guide her hand. When the check arrived she couldn’t sign it and Mort had to forge her name on it to cash it. Laura’s mind was deteriorating rapidly, and she rarely recognized Mort when he came to visit. The whole thing was a nightmare, and as usual, Mort had to handle it while his brother was off living the good life in London.

Not long after Laura Burroughs had entered the nursing home, Billy was sent to Alaska, where Green Valley ran a fishing camp in keeping with the Reverend Von Hilsheimer’s “strenuous life” approach to education. On his way to Halibut Cove, as the place was called, Billy stopped off in St. Louis to see his grandmother. The nursing home was on a dirt road behind a Piggly Wiggly Supermarket. Old eyes in rocking chairs on the porch watched him approach. “She may not know you,” the nurse said. Laura was in a pink robe, strapped to a chair. “She removes her clothing,” the nurse explained. Billy found her purse and took the money out of it. He needed it more than she did. It was a long way to Alaska. The nurse came in and said, “Your time is up.” “No, lady, not mine,” Billy said. He started to cry, and Laura looked up from the chair where she was strapped and asked, “Billy, what’s wrong, lamb?”

Billy returned from Alaska to the Green Valley School at the start of 1968 and promptly fell for a bright and vivacious seventeen-year-old girl named Karen Perry, the daughter of an entomologist who worked for the government in Savannah. Karen hooked him like he’d never been hooked before. At first, she was timid in bed, but then, oh God! The Reverend Von Hilsheimer remembers Karen as the distillation of the Jewish-American princess. She was gorgeous, but did she have a mouth on her, and did she have a temper.

The last week of July, Billy wrote his father: “I’m twenty-one years old now and in order to lead the fullest possible life before the bomb comes and grinds against me, I’m getting married. How’d you like to bounce a diarrhetic runny-nosed grandson on your knee?” Cut to close-up of Burroughs, shaking his head and grimacing. “I have found a fine complex exciting evil cunt whom I’m ready to devote a portion of my life to. . . . She is Karen, she is five foot two, enormously brown-eyed, sexual, and I love her for the thrust and parry, ying yang, cosmic ping-pong of the whole thing.”

The idea was that they would get married in Savannah and live there, but Billy had to convince his probation officer, William J. Cain, to let him leave Florida. Cain called Karen in and told her: “This here paper is Bill’s probation order. This is Bill’s Bible. This little piece of paper is all that stands between Bill and the penitentiary.”

Billy and Karen were married in August 1968 in the Perrys’ backyard by a justice of the peace with a wart on his nose. The rabbi wouldn’t officiate because Billy wasn’t Jewish. Billy thought his in-laws must be saying, “What is our gefilte daughter doing with this goyische writer,” but in spite of everything they were friendly and welcoming—Al Perry, kind though mildly skeptical, and his tiny wife, Libby, who clapped her hands when she was impatient. Billy had wanted a red cummerbund with his rented tux, but that was too flamboyant for the Perrys. He shook hands with people he didn’t know, who said, “It was lovely, it really was.” As he left with Karen he thought they were throwing the rice in his face and on his neck just a bit harder than necessary. His father did not attend but wondered from London how his son was going to support a family when he couldn’t support himself.

They rented a two-bedroom house behind a Japanese restaurant in Savannah Beach, which was known for its strip bars and nightclubs. Billy was writing and Karen was a cocktail waitress, first at the Angle, then at Kitten’s Korner, then at the Black Lace, a strip joint. Billy came by and drank free beer in the lounge. He had started drinking in Alaska and alcohol had become a very good friend. He struck up conversations with customers. He talked to a man who was so far right he’d been blackballed by the John Birch Society. Once a guerrilla in the Philippines, he’d brought back a recipe for Jap Suey.

The Black Lace was a raunchy place. One of the strippers had an act where she took a maraschino cherry from a customer’s drink, put it up her snatch, and shot it out at the audience like a tiny red cannonball. At first, the ass-grabbing drunks provoked Karen to tears—“Hey baby, watcher got under there?” But she wised up fast, and soon developed the authority of a cop.

As for Billy, he was full of plans. He was going to attend the state college. He was going down on the docks to get a job on one of the shrimp boats. He bought a book called Bargain Paradises of the World, and was thinking of going to Australia when he was off probation. For Billy the thought was the deed. Whenever he did accomplish something, it invariably went wrong. He bought an old Mustang and drove it to Denver, where he got a tattoo at Frenchie’s Tattoo Parlor, from Frenchie himself, a huge fat man wearing only overalls. It was a snake curled around a rose, but the rose got infected, turning into a huge scab, which he had to soak hourly in Listerine. Then he traded the Mustang for $200 and a shotgun, and the new owner took off with the car after paying fifty dollars. Billy sawed off the shotgun, making it unusable, and traded it in a bar for a six-pack. . . . From a car to a six-pack. He was glad that Karen put up with him, loony as he was, even though, with his drinking having passed the gusto stage, his sex life had begun to droop. At this time, he wrote in his diary, “I begin to fit into my role as a traveling exercise in other people’s patience.”

While Billy was falling in love and getting married, Burroughs was in London, where he heard from Allen that February of 1968 that Neal Cassady had died, a few days short of his forty-second birthday. Allen had seen it coming. Too much booze and drugs. A few months before, he and Neal had driven down from Bellingham, Washington, to San Francisco, and spent the night together in a motel on Van Ness. Neal’s skin had been cold, sweaty, and corpselike—the chemical cast of amphetamines. It was the first time Allen had ever gotten out of bed with Neal voluntarily, and in despair he walked the streets, pondering the deathly fate that had overtaken the miracle of his youthful romance. In February, Neal had gone to the Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende. On February 3, passing the door of a wedding party, he was invited in. The next morning he was found collapsed by the railroad tracks outside town, and he died later that day in the hospital.

Burroughs lamented the loss of another member of the core group, and remembered their days together in East Texas. At that time, however, he was consumed by a new passion—Scientology. The teaching of L. Ron Hubbard attracted him as a fresh area of psychic investigation, which also might help him where psychoanalysis had failed. Hubbard’s basic premise was that words heard in an unconscious or semiconscious state—a state induced by infantile trauma, anesthesia, or drunkenness—were recorded by the subject. These recorded words he called “engrams,” which loaded you down with emotionally crippling although suppressed memories. For instance, words heard during an operation would, when repeated, cause pain and anxiety. The system of therapy was for the subject to be “audited” on an E-meter—a machine like a lie detector that measured galvanic skin response, when psychic stress created changes in the electrical resistance of the skin. The needle moved when there was a “reading,” which indicated anxiety in response to a question. When you came to a painful incident, you kept running it (repeating the question) until you got a floating needle, showing that the subject was no longer disturbed by the incident. In other words, you repeated the material until it lost its emotional charge and became neutral.

Still suffering from a childhood trauma that he had never been able to unravel, Burroughs thought Scientology auditing was of great benefit. It could do more in ten hours than psychoanalysis could do in ten years. After taking the beginner’s course at the London headquarters, 37 Fitzroy Street, he took the “clear” course in mid-January 1968 at St. Hill, a fortress-like compound lacking only a moat and drawbridge, in East Grinstead, about fifty miles from London.

This was a two-month solo audit course, eight hours a day, five days a week—it was as grueling as a full-time job. At the end you were supposed to be “clear,” that is, rid of your engrams.

The auditing sessions were so emotionally charged that at the first one, Burroughs blacked out. It started rather formally, with the male auditor facing the subject saying: “Pick up the cans, please. This is the session.” As he held the two metal cans, the auditor asked questions and watched for movements of the needle.

“If you were talking to an army colonel, what would you talk about?”

“I couldn’t talk to any army colonel I ever saw.”

“Fine, thank you. All right. If you were talking to an army colonel about that, what would you say exactly?”

“I would tell him he is too stupid to find his own balls.”

“Fine, thank you. And if you were talking to the President, what would you talk about?”

“Drug hysteria.”

“Fine, thank you. And what would you say, exactly?”

“What are you trying to do, turn America into a nation of rats? Our pioneer ancestors would piss in their graves.”

“And if you were talking to the Pope, what would you talk about?”

“Birth control.”

“Fine, thank you. And what would you say exactly?”

“Sure as shit, they will multiply their assholes into the polluted seas.”

“That’s it, we’ll take a break now,” the auditor said, giving him an orange drink. He said that Scientology had the answers he was looking for. Step by step he could become an Operating Thetan (a higher degree of clear).

After the break, they began an exercise called Overts and Withholds. Burroughs talked about Kiki, his Tangier boy, and said that when Kiki went away, he felt dead. The auditor asked him to return to the incident and tell him everything, like what Kiki was wearing.

Burroughs got as far as “it was” when the room went dark and he lost consciousness. The last thing he felt was the hair on the back of his neck rising like a cat’s. The needle was slamming around on the machine. When he came to, he heard the auditor say, “A Rock C slam” (a strong reaction).

As Burroughs continued the sessions, he saw that sometimes there were release points to readings that neither he nor the auditor understood. They were things buried in his unconscious that he didn’t know he knew, but when they surfaced the auditor got a floating needle. When the auditor got a read on a question about hieroglyphs and asked what it meant, Burroughs said, “The emerald beginning and end of word,” and the auditor got a floating needle. On another reading, the release point was the phrase “Why, it’s just an old movie.” Yet another release point was Scobie, the character in the Graham Greene novel The Heart of the Matter, with his rusty handcuffs on the wall.

As rewarding as the auditing process was, Burroughs was distressed by other aspects of Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard, whom no one ever saw, was idolized, particularly by the young female members, who came on at breakfast with thinly disguised sexual dreams about the Great Non-Presence, like young nuns dreaming about their bridegroom Jesus Christ. Burroughs was sharing a house with seven other Scientologists, and they would all pile into a car in the morning and drive like hell, because if you were late you would be put into a condition of Liability, which meant that you had to wear a gray armband and you were not allowed to wash or shave. You had to go around collecting signatures to be absolved of Liability. Also, the attitude toward non-Scientologists was militantly hostile. They were seen as the enemy, and were referred to by Hubbard in his taped lectures as WOGs, the old colonial acronym for Worthy Oriental Gentlemen.

What most disgusted Burroughs, however, were the Sec Checks, a sort of Orwellian thought police. You would be called in for a Sec Check and be asked the following questions on the E-meter: “Are you here for any other reason than what you say you are?” “Do you have any doubts about Scientology?” “Are you connected to a suppressive person [anyone in disagreement with Scientology]?” “Do you harbor any unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard?” Burroughs got a reading on that one, and when the question was repeated, he weaseled out of it by saying, “Yes, I can’t help resenting his perfection.” You learned to say the right thing. But it was humiliating, like a return to kindergarten, and going to Sec Checks reminded him of a line in Céline: “All this time I felt my self-respect slipping away from me, and finally completely gone, as if officially removed.”

Returning to Duke Street on weekends, he used postcard photographs of L. Ron Hubbard as targets for his air pistol, but while cocking the pistol the hammer snapped on his thumb and nearly broke it. Boy, ol’ Ron was spittin’ back the curse. Ian and Alan Watson were still in the flat, but Ian had found a job in computers and was in a much better frame of mind.

In June, as one of those under suspicion of harboring unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard, Burroughs took the dreaded Joburg, a series of 104 questions about every conceivable form of criminal activity. Each question had to be cleared (floating needle), and it took three weeks and eighty hours of auditing, because there were too few auditors and too many applicants. Burroughs ran all the material flat until there wasn’t a tick left.

Of course, on a question like “Did you ever fuck your mother?” you got a protest read, and then if you got a second read they would ask you what that meant, and you might say, “Well, I’ve had this fantasy.” You worked through that, and if you still got a read, it started to look bad.

Burroughs was asked, “Have you ever concealed a body?”

“Of course not.”

“There’s a read here.”

Burroughs saw himself hiding a body in an alley in some sort of ancient Egyptian setting. “I think it’s Whole Track [all past lives],” he said.

The auditor rephrased the question: “In this life, have you ever concealed a body?”

“No.”

“That is clear.”

“Did you ever commit forgery?” the auditor asked. He said he had not. “There’s a read,” the auditor said. He suddenly remembered that he’d forged narcotics prescriptions. The machine knew things the mind had forgotten.

After taking the advanced clearing course in Edinburgh, Burroughs left Scientology, impressed by the auditing techniques but disgusted by the authoritarian organization and the stupidly fascistic utterances of L. Ron Hubbard. The aim of Scientology, complete freedom from past conditioning, was perverted to become a new form of conditioning. He had hoped to find a method of personal emancipation and had found instead another control system. Scientology roped you in and bound you. It was like a state, with its own courts and its own police, its own rewards and penalties, and its own ludicrous jargon.

Returning to his Duke Street flat in July 1968, Burroughs was pleased to find that Alan Watson had left for the south of France with some rich queen. What a relief it was to find him gone. You didn’t know how someone dragged on you until he wasn’t around. The trouble was that Ian had moved out, too, to a mean overpriced hovel in the heart of London’s smogland, at 55 Red Lion Street, way on the wrong side of the British Museum. Burroughs wondered what he could do to get Ian back. It was the sexual attraction between Alan and Ian that made it difficult, like interfering in a boy-girl affair.

For Ian, Scientology was the last straw. Burroughs was on an auditing binge. He wanted to round up people in the street and chain them to E-meters. It was all he could talk about. He put a sign up in the Indica Book Shop, around the corner from Duke Street, which was run by Ian’s friend Barry Miles, offering to do free audits. When he tried to audit Ian, Ian fled, telling Miles, “When Bill turns that Operating Thetan glare on me, I just know it’s time to leave.” It made his skin crawl to have Bill fixing him with this weird eyelock. He hated the whole Scientology movement; it was spurious and tacky, and Bill’s intelligence was being wasted. Bill claimed he was just investigating it but in fact he was hooked. Since he couldn’t audit Ian, he audited Harold Norse, who was spending a few months in London. Norse told him, “I’m lonely.” Burroughs kept running it on the E-meter and discovered that loneliness was a cover, and his real problem was that his boyfriend didn’t want to sleep with him.

Burroughs was cultivating people like John McMasters, who had originated many of the Scientology techniques but had broken with Hubbard. He was a compelling speaker who had traveled the world making thousands of converts to Scientology, and he described himself as “the happiest man alive.” Once Burroughs and McMasters went out to dinner at a restaurant on Greek Street called La Cucaracha. They had quite a bit to drink, and Burroughs gave the waiter a pound to sing “La Cucaracha,” which brought back fond memories of his days as an exterminator. When the song was over, McMasters leaned over close to Burroughs, as though intent on imparting a deep secret, and said, “Did I ever tell you that in my previous incarnation I was Rudolph Valentino?” Burroughs pursed his lips and said: “Really, John? Most interesting.”

The auditing sessions were interrupted that August by an offer he couldn’t refuse. Esquire wanted him to cover the Democratic convention in Chicago, along with Terry Southern and Jean Genet. A hard-hitting troika, thought Burroughs, delighted to get out of London.

The political situation in America was that after the Tet offensive in January and Eugene McCarthy’s success in the early primaries on an antiwar platform, President Johnson had decided in March not to run. Robert Kennedy’s bid ended in tragedy on June 5. The delegates at the Chicago convention would have to choose between McCarthy and Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Horatio Humphrey.

Quite another story, however, was taking place outside the convention hall, in the streets of Chicago, which was like the site of a medieval engagement, like Agincourt or Poitiers, where two opposing armies gathered in formation on a designated field of battle. Ten thousand demonstrators, mostly young, represented a coalition of protest groups including Yippies, Black Panthers, and Students for a Democratic Society. They were outnumbered and outgunned by 16,000 Chicago police officers, 4,000 state police, and 4,000 National Guard troops in full battle dress, armed with machine guns, bazookas, and tanks.

When Burroughs landed at O’Hare on August 24, on his first visit to Chicago in twenty-six years, the customs official touched his cassette recorder and said, “The tools of your trade.” He was staying at the Sheraton, there being no room at the Hilton, the center of the action, where Yippies had exploded a stink bomb in the lobby. At the hotel he met Jean Genet, dressed in old corduroys and an open-necked shirt, his pink and dimpled face reminding Burroughs of a bald, clean-shaven Santa. Genet told him that because he was a convicted criminal, he had been unable to obtain a visa, and had gone to Canada, where a group of Quebec separatists had smuggled him across the border. He had been walking past police lines, he said, and had seen blood-lust in the blue-helmeted cops’ eyes. One cop had stared at him but Genet did not lower his eyes. He heard the cop’s inner voice saying very distinctly, “There is the enemy.”

Michigan Avenue was chaotic. Sandwiched between the police lines were hippies with flutes and finger cymbals, clergymen and other protesting elders (including Dr. Spock), girls with long earrings labeled “Eugene,” and long-haired young men carrying placards that said “Welcome to Fort Daley” (in honor of Chicago’s 200-pound, five-foot-eight mayor, Richard J. Daley), and “there can be no peace in the U.S. until there is peace in Vietnam.” Cars in traffic honked the rhythm of “Hell No, We Won’t Go.”

The next day, August 25, Burroughs went to the airport to catch the arrival of Gene McCarthy. There he was, smiling broadly, and surrounded by his young, scrubbed supporters, who should all have been wearing name tags reading “righteous idealist,” and who were shouting, “The GOP will cry in its beer, for here is a man who will change the scene . . . Geeeeene!”

That evening came the outbreak in hostilities, when the Yippies defied a mayoral decree that Lincoln Park had to be cleared by 11:00 P.M. Burroughs was there, having linked up with Allen Ginsberg and his sense-derangement crew, who were passing around honey spiked with acid. Campfires flickered, voices were raised in song in the summer night, hash pipes were aglow, and Ginsberg was leading his troops in mantras. The scene reminded Terry Southern, who was drinking tequila and taking an occasional hit of Panama Red with his fellow Esquire correspondents, of an updated Currier & Ives print.

At midnight, prowl cars entered the park, and a megaphone voice said: “All persons will leave this park at once! This is an order from the mayor of Chicago and from the Chicago police.” Terry Southern saw someone step out and throw a brick at the windshield of a police car. The searchlights flashed on, and the cops burst out of the woods, riot sticks in hand, clubbing at random. The kids retaliated with rocks and bottles. Then came the tear gas, the sting of which no mantra could relieve. Kids rubbed Vaseline on their cheeks to keep it from burning their skins and tied wet handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths.

One cop came up to Allen Ginsberg, who sat there quietly in the lotus position and said, “Go in peace, brother,” and the cop held back his arm, muttering something about “crazy hippies.” It was later alleged by Terry Southern and Abbie Hoffman that the man who had thrown the brick was an F.B.I. provocateur.

Norman Mailer, also covering the convention and also in Lincoln Park that night, ran into Burroughs and Genet, who had “the determined miserable look of infantrymen trudging to the front. . . . Genet, large as Mickey Rooney, angelic in appearance, glanced at him with that hauteur it takes French intellectuals two decades to acquire. Burroughs merely nodded. Nothing surprised him favorably or unfavorably.”

Actually, Burroughs was surprised. He could not believe that this was taking place in America. At the same time, he reflected, it was history as theater, which had existed from the Stone Age to the present. He had managed not to tangle with the cops by making himself El Hombre Invisible. But when he saw the kids being clubbed, he thought that there were no innocent bystanders. Jean Genet later told him that, pursued by the police, he had run into an apartment building and knocked on a door at random, saying, “C’est monsieur Genet.” The occupant of the apartment, it turned out, was a graduate student who was writing a thesis on him.

Then, on August 28, there was a rally around the Grant Park bandshell. They were going to march, ten thousand strong, down Michigan Avenue to the Hilton. Burroughs had agreed to march in the second row with Allen Ginsberg and Jean Genet, in an impulsive display of participatory journalism, but was feeling uneasy about the whole enterprise. He was hoping he wouldn’t have to march, not being ready for martyrdom, and fearing that his splendid record of never having had a cop lay a violent hand on him in all his brushes with the law might now be compromised. There was no way out, however, for the organizers were giving instructions: “Link arms . . . keep five feet between rows . . . keep your cool . . . you can obtain tear-gas rags from the medics.” Down Michigan Avenue they started, with Burroughs calm and impassive under his gray fedora, all the while thinking, “I hope to God we stop.” In the distance, a solid phalanx of police came into focus. It would be madness, thought Burroughs, to try to force their way through. Thankfully, the organizers did not want violence, and neither did the cops, and the marchers stopped and dispersed.

Although not a movement person, being ambivalent even about his affiliation with the Beats, Burroughs found Chicago a heady experience. He felt that the seeds that he and Allen and Jack had planted years ago were bearing magnificent fruit. These young people challenging the political establishment and battling the Chicago police were in a sense the spiritual offspring of On the Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch. He had really dug the Chicago scene, by comparison with stodgy old London. When you saw 10,000 people in front of Buckingham Palace screaming “Bugger the Queen,” there would be hope for England. But that day would never come. Chicago made Burroughs realize that he could accomplish more in the United States than he could sitting on the godforsaken island like a nineteenth-century queen.

In New York, Burroughs and Genet checked into the Hotel Delmonico to write their stories. Genet had a row with Esquire editor Harold Hayes, objecting to the magazine’s cover photograph, which showed the three correspondents standing over what was meant to be the body of a demonstrator. He refused to pose with this faux mort unless his fee was increased. Hayes called him a thief, and Genet said, “Mais bien entendu, monsieur” (“Well, of course”). Before sneaking back across the Canadian border, Genet got $3,800 out of Esquire, and told Burroughs that Chicago had been one of the great experiences of his life.

In town to tape the William F. Buckley program Firing Line was Jack Kerouac, who dropped in on Burroughs at the Delmonico with three buddies from his hometown of Lowell. One ran a bar, one ran a liquor store, and one was a boxer. Jack was drunk, and ordered more drinks from room service. His friends told Burroughs that he was always that way now—every morning when he woke up he drank a wineglass full of whiskey. He was throwing away his talent and his life but there was nothing they could do. Jack wanted Burroughs to accompany him to the studio, but Burroughs said, “No, Jack, don’t go, you’re not in any condition to go.” In spite of his condition, Jack came off as far more genuine and witty than the supercilious Buckley. When Buckley tried to pin him down on Vietnam, Jack said the war was a conspiracy by North and South Vietnam to acquire American Jeeps. He also said that the hippies were a continuation of the Beats. “The hippies are good kids,” he said. “They’re better than the Beats.”

In October, when Burroughs was back at Duke Street, his enthusiasm for the United States cooled down. His flat was quiet and conducive to work, and he did not think it was beneficial to maintain the state of excitability he had felt in Chicago. A period of calm was in order. Another factor was that he had met a young man in a bar who had moved in with him. John Culverwell was a “Dilly boy,” as the Piccadilly Circus hustlers were called. He was very childlike and well-intentioned, a little like Mikey Portman without any of Mikey’s sloppy habits. And to top it off, he could cook.

Burroughs was well aware of the dangers of domesticity. It was always a dubious decision to bring someone in, because then they were on your hands, and you could get yourself into nightmare situations. It was a very old story, and you could almost predict the stages it would go through. At first they were full of enthusiasm, they wanted to clean everything and cook seven-course meals. Then things began to slacken, and they didn’t want to go near the kitchen or touch a broom. There was the same slackening process with sex. At first it was “You’re the love of my life and it’s so great,” then three months later it wasn’t so great anymore. It became more and more mechanical, and then it came to a complete halt. What could you do? Son cosas de la vida.

Still, it was a risk worth taking, because he needed someone, and Ian had broken away. He had a job and was living his own life, though Burroughs still saw him often. In any case, Culverwell seemed placid and eager to please, and Burroughs tried to teach him the secrets of keeping a place clean—for instance, every time you walk into a room you clean something up or straighten something. But Culverwell was naturally messy, and every time he entered a room he added to the mess. Burroughs saw after a few months that it wasn’t working out, and tried to set him up on his own. He encouraged Culverwell to join the merchant marine, and he did make one trip. But then he was back on his doorstep. It was hopeless, because boys like Culverwell were used to the easy life, drinks and money just for putting out. When they could make five or six pounds a night whoring, they weren’t going to do any other kind of work for less money. The bottom line was that they were bone lazy. Burroughs finally had to tell Culverwell, “So long, it’s been good to know you.”

In 1969, at the time of Culverwell’s residence, Burroughs was working on The Wild Boys and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. In his spare time, he played with his E-meter. When Ian called in March saying that a burst water main had caused traffic to be diverted in front of his building, making an unrelentingly deafening roar, Burroughs told him to run it through the E-meter. The next day Ian told him the traffic had been redirected. Burroughs had great faith in the powers of the E-meter. A thousand blacks with E-meters, he wrote Brion Gysin, could integrate the Bible Belt.

Brion reported that in Tangier, it was a very rainy spring. Children in ragged bands ran through the streets chanting “Yalatif”—“That’s enough.” His novel, The Process, had been published by Doubleday, who were, Brion wrote, passing on hate-filled reviews from the American heartland. Brion was convinced there was a conspiracy to muffle the book, writing that it was “a dead duck returned by the booksellers. It can be kept on ice for a few more days and must, then, go back to the pulper’s before it rots in their storage space. This is because there has not been one single review anywhere. . . . Can they do it to me next time? If they can and will, there is not much use in doing what I am doing, is there?” That Brion could assert in the same letter that there were hate-filled reviews and not a single review was an example of his charming inconsistency.

Then, in April, coming back one night from the little restaurant at the caves of Hercules, on the back of a motorcycle driven by the young American writer John Hopkins, they sideswiped a truck, and two of Brion’s toes were lopped off. From the Spanish hospital, Brion wrote that Hopkins, a blond and handsome Princeton graduate with an independent income, was utterly indifferent to his plight. The idea of going to the law in Tangier was unthinkable. He had no useful allies or accomplices. The affluent expatriates on the mountain had abandoned him, singing, “Let’s all be millionaires together, we don’t want to know.” Hopkins had once told him, “The nice thing about money is that you can shit on anybody and tell them to fuck off.” Brion now felt that he was on the receiving end of that philosophy with his three-toed foot. Hopkins left for Amsterdam to see his Dutch girlfriend and asked Brion, in that flat, semiamused way he had, “What can I bring back, a Rembrandt, a diamond?” Hopkins hadn’t just fucked up Brion’s foot and his summer, he had fucked up his head with worry and anxiety.

Burroughs did not want to interrupt his work to visit Brion, but sent him 200 pounds in August. When Hopkins got back, he agreed to pay Brion $1,500 plus medical expenses. But Brion still felt that Hopkins had acted like a coldhearted bully. And yet, Brion thought, it was his own fault for not having made a clean break with him that night of the straw vote on the 1968 election, at the American Consulate, when he had voted for Wallace.

Nothing was going right for Brion. His manservant and lover, Salah, a tall, mustached, Ethiopian-looking Moroccan, was stealing money from him. When Brion entertained, Salah also stole from the purses of the women guests. Salah had two wives, who were always clamoring for money. Brion did not know what to do about it. The arrival in September 1969 of Jean Genet, mysterious and leprechaun-like, was a welcome relief. He came by every day to cheer Brion up. Brion asked the author-thief, “Do you think Salah finds it more fun to steal than to wheedle it out of me like all the others do?” Genet shrugged. He had his own problems, among them a serious Nembutal habit that kept him in drugged slumber sixteen hours out of twenty-four. In October, the cast came off Brion’s foot. The doctor had done a good job with skin grafts, and he was able to walk without any trace of a limp. But the motorcycle accident was the start of a long period of physical decline.

October 22, 1969, was one of those gray London days, when the city seems ghostly and forlorn, like an attic full of mildewed trunks. Sitting at his desk, Burroughs felt terrible waves of depression pass through his body. He felt so low that he forgot to put the laundry out. The smell of stale flowers and hospitals filled the flat. Then a friend came by with the news that Jack Kerouac had died.

Jack had moved to St. Petersburg with Mémère and his third wife, Stella. On October 20, Stella had heard him groaning in the bathroom. She found him on his knees, vomiting blood. He was taken to the hospital, where he died the next day, after twenty-six blood transfusions. It was the classic drunkard’s death. The cirrhotic liver had rejected the blood that was supposed to flow through it. The backed-up blood broke through the weakest veins, the little veins in the esophagus. He had drowned in his own blood, at the age of forty-seven.

Burroughs wondered what had caused that kind of relentless drinking. Could it be his sick attachment to his mother, from whom he had never been able to free himself, or was it the penalty of success, when everyone wanted a piece of you? He preferred to remember Jack in the early days at Columbia, acting out a scene from Gide’s The Counterfeiters in a bowler hat on Morningside Heights, trying to pick up girls in Times Square on VJ-Day, arm-wrestling with Lucien Carr in one of the booths in the West End.

It took a while for Burroughs to shake off the depression that came with Jack’s death, which was compounded by the feeling that he was stagnating in London. He wasn’t a part of the petty and incestuous literary scene. They were all on short rations, and it was “You write a preface to my book and I’ll write a favorable review of yours.” He occasionally went to Sonia Orwell’s, where he once ran into Stephen Spender, his adversary at the Edinburgh Conference, looking very hangdog because it had recently come out that the C.I.A. was backing his magazine, Encounter. Burroughs had known it for years but everyone said he was paranoid.

He also went to the home of Panna Grady, who had moved to London with the poet Charles Olson and continued to entertain in lavish and dramatic fashion. Dramatic because at one of her parties two poets got into a fight, and at another the police arrived, and Panna asked one of her guests, the distinguished author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson, who was in a reasonably sober state, to go to the door and make the proper English noises.

When Olson died in 1970, at the age of sixty, she married Philip O’Connor, author of Memoirs of a Public Baby, and a reputed enfant terrible. He would introduce himself as “Panna Grady’s terrible husband.” Once, when he consulted Burroughs about a cure for alcoholism, he said, sizing him up, “You’re bourgeois, aren’t you?” and Burroughs replied, “Yes, I am bourgeois.” For O’Connor, much of whose work was a critique of modern literature, Burroughs’ remark was a key to the understanding of his writing. Much of avant-garde writing, he thought, was done by ideologically conservative authors, James Joyce and Beckett and Burroughs among them. What was Burroughs’ position in the culture? He was a man in whom the tenderness had been warped, and so he attempted to convey meaning without humanity. Céline was a writer in a similar situation. It was human to hate humanity, but to ignore it was impossible. So that for O’Connor, Burroughs’ work was a shell, at best a raincoat in bad weather.

And what was Burroughs’ position as an artist? O’Connor asked himself. He was the antibourgeois provided by the bourgeoisie, ideologically bankrupt, writing out of emotional disappointment. What would his shocking novelties become but wrapping paper for yesterday’s toys? His work left no lasting impression in the end. He was a blower of bubbles. In the end the reader said: There is no fun in the relish of destruction. In Burroughs there was an old-fashioned man, an authoritarian individualist, who tried to escape from his own narcissism through various out-of-the-body strategies. Burroughs might remain, but O’Connor doubted it, for as Gorky had said, “Some things are too disgusting to write about.” But the truth was not disgusting, and shit was not food.

O’Connor’s remarks were a distress signal, an SOS at the state of postmodern literature in general. Burroughs wrote as a postmodern artist, post-Marx, post-Freud, and post-Bomb, in an era when God was dead and literature was exhausted, when at any moment the planet might go off like a firecracker. What was the point of writing a coherent beginning-middle-end narrative, with its tripartite structure reminiscent of the Trinity, when history itself was incoherent, with its own tripartite progression from ancient to medieval to modern offering cold comfort in the nuclear age? Life no longer seemed grounded, the former certainties no longer served. The Word itself was suspect as a method of control, and Burroughs used cut-ups and fragmented episodes as a way to avoid manipulating the reader. The writing became very much like the nervous, distraught, uncertain quality of contemporary life, where “the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” To call it “a raincoat in bad weather” was to wish for the good old days when the sun was always out.

Aside from the odd social occasion, Burroughs sometimes received admirers. He had a number of rock stars among his fans. David Bowie told him that his songs owed a lot to the cut-up method. Mick Jagger invited him to his wedding to Bianca. He would be flown to the south of France on a chartered plane with the other famous guests. But it wasn’t his scene. He didn’t want to be sitting on a hot terrace through an interminable wedding lunch, squeezed between the Begum and Marianne Faithfull. Mick was offended—it was lèse-majesté. He did go to Mick’s farewell party outside London, but he hated it. He had never mastered the art of talking in the bedlam of a noisy party, and wondered how some people could do it day after day.

From time to time he traveled, mostly to Tangier. In the summer of 1970 he spent a couple of months in New York. His painter friend David Budd had some movie people interested in The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, and he went over to work on the script, but it came to nothing. Returning to London made him think: Wouldn’t I rather be in New York where any hour of the day or night there’s a place to eat . . . what the hell am I doing in London? Culverwell was gone and he had not found a replacement. Alan Watson cleaned his flat once but Burroughs decided that once was enough when he discovered that Alan was helping himself to his tincture of cannabis.

The news about his mother was not good. She had regressed to a childlike condition and was under sedation; at least she no longer took off her clothes and tore them into shreds. She would talk coherently for a moment and then drift off into nonsense. When Miggy came to visit, she would say, “Oh, this is the lady that does my laundry.”

On October 20, 1970, a telegram arrived that said MOTHER DEAD. She was eighty-two. For a moment, he felt nothing at all, and then it came, like a kick in the stomach. Burroughs thought of her in the nursing home, her hair cut very short, clutching her pink robe, her bare feet blue-veined. No doubt about it, he had her physique, thin and long-boned, and the Lee forehead, high and straight up and down. She had a special ephemeral quality, and she was psychic. She had dreamed that Mort, his face covered with blood, had come to the door and said, “Mother, we’ve had an accident,” and Mort had in fact been in an accident and suffered minor cuts. Once, long ago, she had said: “Suppose I was very sick? Would you come to see me? Look after me? Care for me? I’m counting on that . . .” He had promised that he would, but in the last years of her life, when she was in the nursing home, hallucinating and wandering around naked, he had never once gone to see her, even though he had been in the United States several times. All he did was send mawkish cards on Mother’s Day. And now she was gone. Mistakes too monstrous for remorse.

His life in London was increasingly dreary. Nothing was happening. There were no surprises. He had no amigo. Ian was now a highly paid computer programmer, busy with his work. Mikey Portman was out of the picture with an alternate junk and alcohol habit. He had the record for apomorphine cures, averaging one every two months.

Then, in May 1971, there was a flurry of activity over a film version of Naked Lunch. Brion Gysin wrote a script and Anthony Balch wanted to direct. Mick Jagger was interested, but when he came to the Duke Street flat Burroughs could see it wasn’t going to work. Mick did not want Balch as director. He didn’t like him. He thought Balch was coming on to him sexually, and in any case he didn’t have a reputation as a director in the industry. He wasn’t bankable. Balch had formed Friendly Films for the Naked Lunch project, and Burroughs thought it was an education to see Mick’s palace favorites go into action and sign him up for a different film part. It was just as well. Mick was inseparable from his groupies and his Nicaraguan bride.

In October 1971 Burroughs was offered a teaching appointment in Switzerland. Al de Grazia, a political scientist and the brother of Ed de Grazia, who had handled the Naked Lunch obscenity trial for Grove Press, had founded the University of the New World in the Alpine village of Haute-Nendaz. It was intended as an alternative to the over-structured American colleges, where young people could learn in an untrammeled spirit of inquiry, without regulations or deans’ offices. Instead of classes, there were “studios” and “rapport groups.” The students wore T-shirts that said, “No classes, no grades, no exams.” They could have added, “No tuition,” since very few of them were paid up.

Al de Grazia had hit on the novel scheme of printing his own currency, with bills called Cows, since they had a picture of a heifer on both sides. “On the first business day of any month,” it was stated on the bills, “the University will pay to the bearer, in exchange for this coupon, its face value in Swiss francs. A 2% premium will be added. Not valid unless stamped with official University of the New World seal.” There was, however, some resistance on the part of local shopkeepers to accepting Cows as legal tender.

Burroughs was looking forward to three months of light teaching in the clean mountain air. The brochure showed a lovely campus of Swiss chalets nestled in pine groves at 4,000 feet, with mountain peaks in the background. But when he took a taxi at the train station and asked for the University of the New World, he was taken to a broken-down shack in the middle of a field. No one seemed to be around. He walked to the village and found a hotel, where a room had been reserved in his name. At least he had a roof over his head. But where was everybody? He finally ran into a couple of students who clued him in.

The school had attracted the drifters and dropouts on the international hippie circuit, and the prim Swiss were up in arms over the open use of drugs in their little town. In addition, some black musicians from the “music studio” had begun dating local girls, a practice that was frowned on by the elders. Burroughs saw the University of the New World disintegrating before his eyes. He knew he would not be paid, and he hoped he would not get stuck with the bill at the Hotel Montcalm, where he had been put up. If he got his fare back to London it would be a miracle. What a mess! As for the clean mountain air, after London, it had incapacitated him with a racking cough. The nearest drugstore was fifteen miles away, but he managed to get a batch of codeine pills and took to his bed with a pile of science fiction novels.

When he felt better he gave a couple of lectures. But stupidity was rampant among the students. “Uhhh,” one asked, “the heat in the radiators, where does it come from?” Another remarked that Tangier must be very hot because it was in Africa, while a third asserted that big planes were safer than small planes because they were bigger. My Gawd, thought Burroughs, this university is pas sérieux. He was practically the only teacher who had shown up. The instructor who was supposed to teach the film course had taken off with the only projector.

For once, Burroughs was genuinely glad to get back to London. Anything was better than this madness with the hippies and the Cows. And yet he continued to feel the need to move, and thought about Afghanistan and southern Morocco. He had a conversation with his imaginary godfather:

“My books aren’t selling and soon I shall have no money. What shall I do?”

“I suppose you have thought of cutting expenses, going to live in Tangier perhaps and writing another novel perhaps in a more popular vein?”

“Well, that would be the logical thing to do.”

“And how many times have I told you that when you are in difficulties the ‘logical’ thing to do is always wrong, since it is just this ‘logic’ that has put you in your present difficulties?”

Things happened more often because of the unexpected than because of logic. In April 1972, an invitation arrived from Terry Southern, who had established himself as a screenwriter with Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider, to come to Hollywood. The deal was this: Chuck Barris, a producer who had made a fortune with a television program called “The Dating Game,” was interested in making a movie of Naked Lunch. Why this clean-living, teetotaling, vegetarian “king of the game shows” was drawn to an avant-garde novel that had been banned for obscenity was not theirs to reason why.

Burroughs and Southern were met at the Los Angeles airport by a chauffeured Daimler and driven to their hotel on Sunset Boulevard. The next day, Barris invited them to his house in Bel-Air, but this time the car that came to get them was a Toyota. There had, it seemed, been a sharp decline in status. The car was a two-seater with a driver, so that Burroughs practically had to sit in Terry’s lap. Moreover, when they were dropped off at the house, Barris was not there. “Not like old Chuck to do a thing like this,” Terry said. “I hate to tell you,” Burroughs replied, “but he don’t like the script and we’d better get out of here before he refuses to pay the hotel bill.” He’d obviously done this on purpose to put them in their place. Burroughs wondered what possible misconception could have led to such a fiasco, and how they were going to get back to their hotel. Luckily Terry had friends a block away, and they called a cab. Barris had left instructions at the hotel that he would pay for the rooms but not for room service. Reflecting on such recent events as the University of the New World and the Chuck Barris experience, it seemed to Burroughs that life was one humiliation after the other.

In New York his spirits picked up when he went to X-rated gay movies. He felt a small stirring of pride that he had played a role in the whittling down of censorship. Now these blue movies would put him out of business. Who was going to read The Wild Boys when they could see Jerry, Audrey, Johnny, Ali, and Jimmy do it all on the screen? It was a one-way street. Once you had seen the fuck films you could not go back to the semiclad. Sex was everything. Sex was time made solid enough to fuck.

That was another drawback to London. No blue movies. England now seemed to him a gloomy cold unlighted sinking ship that would disappear with a spectral cough. After the top men had split the take there wasn’t enough left to pay a living wage.

Burroughs had been hoping that marriage would help Billy settle down, but trouble seemed to hound the boy. In 1970 he and Karen had returned to the Green Valley School as junior staff, a category that the Reverend Von Hilsheimer had thought up for former students who couldn’t make it on the outside. Karen ran the kitchen and Billy did odd jobs, picking up supplies and driving students to the doctor. To Ron Nowicki, the headmaster, Billy’s face already showed the ravages of drinking—it reminded him of a map of the Middle East. And the way he dressed! As though Helen Keller had picked out his wardrobe. Once, while driving from Orlando to Orange City, Billy had bent over to light a cigarette, taking both hands off the wheel, and driven into a culvert. The car flipped over and was totaled, but he was unhurt.

Now, in October 1972, Billy wrote his father: “Disaster. Wife leaving me. Or rather I’m informed that my absence is required. I desperately need about $250 to hustle my ass back out West and try to make a start. . . . I’ve got to go and I’ve got to go soon. . . . It’s bad, Bill, it’s very bad when a six-year investment in another person comes to bankruptcy.” (In fact it was four years.)

Burroughs was unable to express any sympathy for his son’s distress. His attitude was: We all have to take our lumps. I’ve taken mine, and you have to take yours. He seemed incapable of normal human compassion toward a son who he knew from past experience had a fragile sense of himself. “I never know what to say when someone tells me his wife is leaving him,” he replied on October 30. “Son cosas de la vida, hombre.” He did, however, respond to Billy’s “desperate need,” enclosing a check for $500.

At about the time that Billy and Karen were breaking up, Burroughs met another “Dilly boy,” a short, strong, black-haired young man named John Brady, the son of Irish farmers. He was a bad-tempered drinker, but Burroughs asked him to move in, because he was lonely. He was tired of eating dinner by himself every night. How many evenings had he sat alone at the Angus Steak House with his steak, his baked potato, his half-bottle of Beaujolais, and only the Italian waiter for company.

He knew it was a mistake, but sometimes mistakes had to be made. Boys like John Brady had no education, and you could tell yourself that you were going to help them, but very often you succeeded only in giving them a little glimpse of something beyond Piccadilly, beyond their way of life, and then they were left stranded. You could take them so far and no further, and they were better off not being taken at all, because it made them feel out of place, disoriented. Even so, John Brady was not stupid—he had the natural savoir-faire of the Irish.

John Brady did have one trait that Burroughs prized highly—he talked in his sleep, and the words that came out of his mouth were natural cut-ups, which Burroughs wrote down and collected in a scrapbook: “Balls, you get nothing . . . nothing.” “What about her up in the sky?” “Where’s it go, into her sleeping drawers?” “Prince’s gold is only old cock . . . load of monkeys.” And many more disjointed observations. So that in spite of the difficulties Brady created, Burroughs the writer got his pound of flesh.

In January 1973, he took John Brady to Morocco, where he had a magazine assignment. In a mountain village south of Tangier called Joujouka, reached over a twisting dirt road that reminded Burroughs of a Missouri country road in the 1920s, there lived a group of musicians known as the “Pipers of Pan.” These men were a special caste who traced their lineage to pre-Christian times. Down the generations for more than two thousand years their music had been passed on from father to son, without written notation. Exempted from farm work by the Moroccan government, they did nothing but play from birth, learning the arduous breathing technique on the raita (Moroccan oboe) that allowed them to sustain notes for what seemed like interminable periods.

These master musicians of Joujouka were secretive, and seldom played outside their village, which was little known and hard to reach. They were more on the order of a religious brotherhood than a tourist attraction. Brion Gysin, in his quest for all things Moroccan, had discovered them through his painter friend Hamri. Brion had taken the Rolling Stones to hear them play, and Brian Jones had been so impressed that he returned with a sound engineer and recorded their music. But by the time the record was issued, Brian Jones was dead. What a cheapshit guy he had been, thought Gysin. He never paid his bills, and the musicians never got a penny. He had been as slippery as they come. When he brushed the bangs out of his forehead you saw two hard beady little eyes.

Once a year in Joujouka there occurred the feast of Bou Jeloud, the Goat God, and this was the event that Burroughs had come to cover. An added attraction was that the great jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman would be there to study the master musicians’ techniques and perhaps play along with them.

Arriving in the village of thatch-roofed houses with cactus-lined lanes, Burroughs was greeted by Hamri, who had appointed himself the master musicians’ manager. Eyes and smile flashing, large head on short body, Hamri had prepared food for fifty people: “Pinchitos (meat on a skewer), chicken, fish, all what you like.” It was chilly in the January air, and Burroughs donned a brown djellabah, which he thought made him look like a walking tent.

That evening, the thirty-odd musicians, all wearing white robes and brown wool turbans, began to play, raitas and drums standing next to one another in a single line in the village square. It was a continuous, sinuous rope of music, uncoiling at an ear-splitting volume, ancient and yet contemporary. When Ornette Coleman played, building up counter-harmonies, it seemed to Burroughs that he was listening to a 2,000-year-old rock ’n’ roll band. When the two forms met, this music from Punic times and modern jazz, it created a new frontier of sound.

Suddenly, screaming women ran into the village green, and the musicians stepped up the tempo. The women were being pursued by Bou Jeloud, Pan the Goat God, Master of Skins and Master of Fear. Covered with black goatskins, his head hidden under a furry animal headdress, the athletic young villager playing Bou Jeloud jumped high in the air, chased the women, and flailed them with switches. They scattered, caught in the reality of the moment, feeling real fear. The Master of Skins was making them jump out of their skins.

They were acting out an ancient mating rite, as the women sang the song of Crazy Aisha, who lures the Goat God to the village to impregnate them, the song balancing the music of Bou Jeloud, marking the old balance of power between male and female forces. “We will give you cross-eyed Aisha,” the women sang, “and we will give you humpbacked Zora,” and Bou Jeloud was enticed by this promise of womanhood, for he was sexuality itself.

A bonfire was lit, and Burroughs saw Bou Jeloud throw himself into it and roll around in the hot coals, emerging with coals sticking to his bare feet. And through it all the music continued, this unbroken blast of pipes and drums, this anthem of a lost civilization. It was a shattering experience, and Burroughs could only agree with the little Moroccan drummer who kept repeating what were probably the only English words he knew: “Very good everything. Outasight.”

Back in London, Burroughs continued with his psychic experiments. He was interested in out-of-the-body experiences, the idea that with the right techniques it was possible to leave one’s body and then go back into it. Flying dreams, it was said, were a form of out-of-the-body experience. He took a course called Mind Dimensions to achieve deep relaxation in a waking state. In May, he attended a workshop given by a reputed healer, Major Bruce McManaway. A regular army officer, McManaway had discovered his healing powers during World War II, when his unit was cut off without medical kits and he found that he could relieve the pain of his wounded men by laying on hands. The navy later used him to locate German submarines in the North Atlantic. McManaway was a levelheaded, feet-on-the-ground sort of person who just happened to have psychic powers. But when he said he had seen group concentration lift a grand piano, Burroughs said to himself, “I’m from the ‘show-me state,’ and I’d sure like to see it.”

At the workshop they studied visualization techniques. Burroughs was given a name and an address and was asked to visualize the person’s ailment. He saw swollen veins. It turned out that the person had varicose veins. Then they sat in a circle, about twenty of them, and Major Bruce said, “There is a pillar of light in the middle of the circle, and I want you all to go up through the pillar of light . . . and then you will come to a plateau and you will see men in white robes.” Burroughs could feel himself climbing up the pillar of light, he could feel himself up there . . . but a couple of the others in the circle couldn’t get back down. They were sitting there in a deep trance and Major Bruce had to coax them gently in.

That August of 1973 Burroughs heard from his son, who was in Savannah, reunited with Karen. Billy’s book Speed, an autobiographical account of his New York bust, was out, and Burroughs wrote him that he had found it “hypnotically readable.” Billy had a small advance on a second book, but found it hard to get cranked up. “What I want to do,” he said, “is write to change the way people feel in their hearts.” He couldn’t make a living writing, however, and needed to find some form of gainful employment. He asked his father to lend him $1,000 so he could take a six-week trucking school course in Atlanta. Ten trucking companies hired from the school, and he could make $15,000 a year driving heavy equipment long distance. This was no last-ditch thing, he emphasized, but something he’d been thinking about for years. But the move to Atlanta led to another breakup with Karen, this one final. In deep depression, Billy went to Boulder, Colorado, and drank himself out from under hangovers at the Coors plant, where the 3.2 beer flowed free. “How about the knowledge of what a God-awful mess you are,” he wrote his father, “that knowledge sitting on your shoulders with the full weight of every fuckup you managed as far back as fractured memory serves? You’re a long way from the ocean—but you know it’s deep.” He went to Santa Cruz and met a diminutive blond flower child named Georgette Larrouy, who was into astrology, acupuncture, the effects of colors on your psyche, the Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes. She was also addicted to helping castaways. Billy moved in with her and tried to write more and drink less. He was given a checkup at the welfare clinic, and the doctor put him down as a borderline psychopath; in other words, thought Billy, someone who doesn’t learn from unpleasant experiences.

There wasn’t much that Burroughs could do for Billy, except send him money from time to time. At the age of fifty-nine, he was himself at a point of crisis, certain that he had to leave England. Prices had doubled and the whole island was going downhill. Anywhere but here, he thought, Ireland which had no tax on artists, or Costa Rica. He wanted to see some sun and water (other than rain), and do some fishing and walking, and cut wood.

“Is London Foundering?” was the name of a TV program. People were less pleasant and showed their worst side when a country started to decline. One woman on the program said, “I don’t want to bring children up in this country.” Burroughs fumed at what he was paying for his hole-in-the-wall apartment with a closet for a kitchen. And the rent was only the beginning, because you had to pay something called rates. And instead of central heating they had storage heaters that didn’t work, and the only person allowed to fix them had to come from the Electricity Board. And when he finally came over he fiddled around and said, “We don’t have the elements, this is an old heater.” For six weeks that winter he froze, sometimes staying in bed all day under the covers, and he finally told the janitor, “Get this goddamn thing out of here,” and started using a plug-in electric heater.

Burroughs began to feel that he was in enemy territory, and in a situation like that you had to defend yourself. There was a Soho espresso joint, the Moka Bar, at 29 Frith Street, where on several occasions a snarling counterman had treated him with outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy, and served him poisonous cheesecake that made him sick. He decided to retaliate by putting a curse on the place. On August 3, 1973, he took pictures and made recordings, in plain sight of the horrible old proprietor, his frizzy-haired wife, and his slack-jawed son. Then he strolled over to the Brewer Street Market and recorded a three-card monte game—now you see it, now you don’t. He came back to the Moka Bar several days later to make new tapes over the first tapes and take more pictures. The idea was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had taken place two days ago and you superimposed it on what was happening now, which pulled them out of their time position. When the Moka Bar closed down on October 30 and was replaced by the Queen’s Snack Bar, Burroughs was sure that his curse had worked.

Was London foundering? The answer was yes. Every day in London gave him a sense of utter hopelessness, in the smallest things, as when the man at Fortnum and Mason’s slighted him: “Are you next, sir?” Then he pretended not to find what Burroughs was pointing at. “You mean this, sir . . . or this . . . or that?” It was a weary time. Every day just hanging on some hideous insult or humiliation. The change without thanks. “We don’t sell it by the stalk, sir.” Not being let into Rules because the friend he was with was wearing a leather jacket. And then, when they did let you in, you had to tip the guy that carved the meat. Guy Fawkes had the right idea—blow the whole shithouse sky-high.

More than London, however, his low spirits could be traced to John Brady, who was a mean drunk. All the other Dilly boys were scared of him. Johnny started bringing strange Irish girls around to Duke Street. In the morning, Burroughs would be making his cup of tea when a girl with no top on would rush by on her way to the bathroom. Burroughs was horrified. Once, he had to post bail for one of Johnny’s girls, who had been arrested for soliciting. In addition, Johnny started to steal. Every day Burroughs gave him five pounds and a bottle of whiskey, but it wasn’t enough. He would say, “Johnny, I was going to give you five pounds out of my wallet, but I seem to be short five pounds.” He didn’t even bother to deny it—just looked insolent. When Burroughs pressed him, he said, “Well, put yourself in my shoes.” “That’s very difficult,” Burroughs thought to himself.

Several times, Burroughs told him he would have to leave, which made him even sulkier and more hostile. Then one day he insolently, deliberately, threw ashes on the floor. “Pick up those ashes,” Burroughs said, and Johnny went into the kitchen and came out, not with a dustpan but with a meat cleaver. Burroughs was sitting at his desk and Johnny slammed the meat cleaver down—Thunk—an inch away from his hand. Then, with a wild look in his eyes, he said, “Light my cigarette.” Burroughs lit it with a steady hand and calmed him down until he was smiling. “How about a cup of coffee?” he asked Johnny. The danger was past. He told Anthony Balch what had happened, and Balch said: “You’d better get rid of that boy as quick as you can before he kills you. Don’t you know he once threatened his mother with an axe?” Burroughs had seen it too many times: the deterioration of the impeccable boy.

Balch was a loyal friend, living in the same building, and picking Burroughs up for dinner each evening, and listening patiently as he went down his list of grievances. At the top of the list was Ian Sommerville, who had moved to Bath, where he had a good computer job. Burroughs wished he had tried to convince him to stay in London. But he had said nothing to hold him back. Then he would start in on what he didn’t like about London—the pub life, the underground system, the VAT tax, where they had you constantly filling out forms, and you had to write down the cost of every cab ride . . . it was diabolical. He had no friends, he had no social life, he wasn’t part of the literary scene, he never gave a reading, because all they offered you was a glass of sherry. All he did was work, eight days a week.

Burroughs needed money to escape from England, and the possibility arose that he might sell his archives. The idea came from Brion, who had kept a trunk filled with Burroughs material all these many years. They got Barry Miles of the Indica bookstore to help them catalogue it, and spent months going over it. They approached Andreas Brown of the Gotham Book Mart in New York, who said Columbia University, which already had the Allen Ginsberg deposit, was interested. But then Brion brought in another dealer, Richard Aaron, who said he had a buyer who would pay cash on delivery. They broke their written agreement with Andreas Brown, who was not pleased. Aaron’s buyer was a mysterious financier in Liechtenstein, Roberto Altman, who had dreams of building a library and museum, and who believed the Burroughs archive would be a promising start for his collection.

In August 1973, with the archive indexed and catalogued, Burroughs took it to Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, with Brion Gysin and Richard Aaron. Burroughs lived through what seemed to be one of the scenes in the thrillers he had written as a boy. In his vaulted and paneled office, the mysterious financier took possession of the archive. When he snapped his fingers, in came Igor, a feature of every Liechtenstein transaction, the holder of the cash. He counted it in their presence, flipping the bills with incredible speed and dexterity, and packed the banded sheaves into a briefcase. They spent the night in the financier’s house, under the passive surveillance of Rembrandt portraits, and Burroughs thought that he should perhaps establish himself in Vaduz, close to his archives. But the billionaires who were packed into the tiny principality seemed to cry out with one voice: YOU CAN’T COME IN HERE. THERE SIMPLY ISN’T ROOM.

The next day they drove to Richard Aaron’s bank in Switzerland in a blinding rain. When they stopped for a bite to eat, Burroughs never loosened his hold on the briefcase, to which he was shackled with imaginary handcuffs. In the banker’s outer office, he saw a portly black man with tribal marks on his face, holding a briefcase just like his. He was led into a little private room, where, as he waited, he spotted on the banker’s desk a card from the foreign minister of Ghana. Then the banker arrived, exuding good cheer, and when Burroughs asked about moving the money out if he needed it, the banker said, “Il n’y a pas de problème.” After Richard Aaron’s commission and Miles’s fee, Burroughs and Brion split the rest and Burroughs was left with a little nest egg to hatch him out of England.

With the archive sold, the opportunity now existed for escape, thanks to Allen Ginsberg, who had a way of showing up whenever Burroughs needed a push in the right direction. Allen had seen Burroughs while passing through London, and had found him depressed and drinking too much, repeating himself, sodden and self-pitying and lacking the old brilliance. Working behind the scenes in New York, Allen had contacted Leo Hamalian, director of the creative writing program at City College, who told Edward Quinn, chairman of the English Department, that Burroughs was available for teaching. City College had just launched a three-month course taught by distinguished writers, which had been kicked off in 1973 by Anthony Burgess. In November 1973, Burroughs was invited to teach the 1974 course from February to May, for a fee of $7,000, and he accepted. Out of the blue had come this letter full of promise, at a time when he’d just about given up.

No matter how depressed he was, no matter how grim London seemed, no matter how friendless and alone he felt, there was one thing that Burroughs always managed to do, and that was write. To sit down at his desk and peck away at his typewriter in a drugged or trancelike state was more than a professional activity—it was a lifeline, an absolute necessity, a way of connecting with the world, a way of fleeing from the world into fantasy, and a way of reconstructing the world according to Burroughs.

Roughly half his characters and scenes came from dreams. A light sleeper, he kept a pen and notebook on a bedside table, writing them down as they occurred. If he didn’t, by morning he forgot them. Sometimes they were precognitive dreams. In one, a landlady showed him a room with five beds and he protested that he did not want four roommates. Several weeks later he was shown a room with five beds. Other dreams, as recorded in his dream notes, had to do with people he knew:

“Paul and Jane came in and ordered some expensive dessert that looked like a house made of cake. I had just been in a boxing match where I felt I had lost on points.”

“I was working in a glass factory. The key to my mailbox had broken. Samuel Beckett had a key-making shop opposite the factory. But I went to another shop next door, not wishing to ask him to make the key. Then he was driving me home to Price Road in a bus driving very fast. We finally came to a sort of inn.”

“Terrible quarrel with Joan, who wouldn’t let me alone to go to the toilet. I scream ‘I hate you.’ She is rubbing something on me like green fairy stone. ‘Words,’ she said.” (Fairy Stone was a greasy pink cake people used to rub on for sunburn.) Burroughs’ comment on his late wife’s appearance was, “As Hoagy Carmichael sang, ‘Talking is a woman, listening is a man.’”

Most of the dreams, however, were scenes that he could convert directly into his books, such as “A young boy was doused with gasoline and burned to death,” or “A tall youth with red hair grins and dances, swinging a sort of bucket.”

Another source of material was what Burroughs took from other writers. Bad writers borrow, the saying goes, good writers steal—that is, what they take they make their own. In the margins of passages he liked Burroughs would write GETS, which meant Good Enough to Steal, as in this sentence from “A Country Love Story,” by Jean Stafford: “Sometimes she had to push away the dense sleep as if it were a door.” That sentence or one very like it would turn up in one of his books.

During the London years, Burroughs produced four books. It did not embarrass him to hear them praised as landmarks marking the end of history they might otherwise deserve to go down in. At the same time, he had to compete with himself, with the albatross of Naked Lunch, for there were those who said, “Well, that was a great book, but nothing since has come close.”

In 1970, Grove Press brought out The Job, a sort of “the-author-explains-himself” book in the form of a long interview with a French admirer, Daniel Odier. The title came from the ten-year-old son of his friends Sanche and Nancy de Gramont, Gabriel, who said, as he was leaving for school, “I have to go to my job.” In the book, Burroughs tirelessly rode his various hobbyhorses.

On the prophetic nature of cut-ups: He had written about J. Paul Getty, “It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.” Three years later Getty’s son sued him.

His struggle against control systems: The Mayans had the perfect control system through their calendar, which was a monopoly of the priestly caste, and which told the population what to do on a daily basis. In our society, Burroughs was combating the encroachment of the family and the nation. Children should be raised in communes, away from their parents. The nation was a bankrupt political form: “You draw a line around a piece of ground and say this is a nation. Then you have to have police, customs control, armies, and eventually trouble with the people on the other side of the line.”

On his critics: Wright Morris had called Naked Lunch a “hemorrhage of the imagination.” Burroughs wasn’t sure that was a compliment, but in any case had no idea who Wright Morris was. In Encounter, George Steiner, expressing his repulsion for Burroughs’ explicit sex scenes, said, “In the name of human privacy, enough!” In whose name, Burroughs wondered, was privacy being evoked? In the name of the C.I.A., which secretly subsidized Encounter? In the name of the F.B.I., which had bugged Martin Luther King’s bedroom? The breakdown of privacy was officially sanctioned at the highest government levels.

On the Beat movement: “I don’t associate with it at all, and never have, either with their objectives or their literary style. I have some close personal friends . . . but we’re not doing at all the same thing, either in writing or in outlook.” Burroughs owed a lot to his reputation as a Beat chieftain, but preferred to position himself as the Lone Gunman.

His misogyny, fueled by Brion Gysin, had not mellowed with the years: “In the words of one of the great misogynists, plain Mr. Jones in Joseph Conrad’s Victory, ‘Women are a perfect curse.’ I think they were a basic mistake and the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error.

“American women are possibly one of the worst expressions of the female sex because they’ve been allowed to go further. . . . America is a matriarchal, white supremacist country. There seems to be a definite link between matriarchy and white supremacy.”

All in all, it was a stimulating performance, by turns brilliant and cranky, mundane and apocalyptic. The Job to be done, of course, was the elimination of traditional thought patterns and the creation of some new way of living.

Also first published in 1970, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz was written in the form of a screenplay. In October 1935 in Newark’s Palace Chop House, Arthur Flegenheimer, alias Dutch Schultz, then considered New York’s leading gangster, was gunned down by three rival mobsters. He survived for two days, in a guarded hospital room, where a police stenographer at his bedside took down his stream-of-consciousness last words, a fevered rumination mixing the present and the past, which seemed to Burroughs a ready-made cut-up.

Burroughs reconstructed the spirit of the time, the gang wars, the double-crosses, the continuously threatened lives of the mob bosses. He used many of the strange phrases taken down by the stenographers, which were remarkably like his own cut-up compositions:

“Come on, open the soap duckets.”

“The chimney sweeps take to the sword.”

“A boy has never wept or dashed a thousand Kim.”

“My gilt-edge stuff and those dirty rats have tuned in.”

Publishers Weekly described the book as “a gruesome, hallucinatory exposition . . . an empirical brevity keeps the poetry of brutality from becoming unendurably tiresome.”

Published by Grove in 1971, The Wild Boys was a turning point for Burroughs, in that it was based on new material, and in that it returned to straight narrative after the lengthy period of experimentation with cut-ups. The wild boys were homosexual warrior packs, originating in Marrakesh in 1969, who had spread all over the world, setting up their own tribal society, and speaking their own language. The first ones were born of woman and removed to communes after birth so that they never saw a woman’s face or heard a woman’s voice. When they grew up they devised a method of cloning, so that they became self-generating. They took drugs, they were violent, and they spent an immoderate amount of time having sex. It was Burroughs’ Utopian vision of an alternative society, and, like all his writing, a search for a way to escape social conditioning, time, and his own body.

One of Burroughs’ sources for The Wild Boys was a science-fiction work by Poul Anderson called The Twilight World. The way he adapted other writers’ materials can be seen in the following example:

Twilight World: “The boy was small for his fourteen years, lean and ragged. Under ruffled brown hair his face was thin, straight-lined and delicately cut, but the huge blue eyes were vacant.”

Wild Boys: “A dead leaf caught in Audrey’s ruffled brown hair.”

Twilight World: “The point of origin was named as St. Louis, Missouri, and the date was just prior to that recorded for the outbreak of the final war.”

Wild Boys: “The old broken point of origin, St. Louis, Missouri.”

The Wild Boys also saw the introduction of Audrey Carsons, a largely autobiographical character. Gone is the hard-boiled, cynical authorial voice of Naked Lunch, the narrator William Lee. He has been replaced by a self-conscious boy, a misfit, who is painfully aware of being unwholesome, and who will drag his unwholesomeness through most of Burroughs’ next books.

On the theory that “what is rejected in the final typescript is often as good or better than what goes in,” Burroughs took the leftover material from Wild Boys and turned it into another novel called Port of Saints, which might also be called The Further Adventures of the Wild Boys, or Wild Boys Redux. This time the wild boys have time-traveled back to 1845, and are acting as advisers to black guerrillas in the West Indies, who are fighting the combined colonial powers of England and Portugal. They triumph thanks to the invention of an advanced grenade. All the leftover boys are on hand, up to their old tricks—Karate Boys, Circus Boys, Elephant Boys, Shaman Boys, Music Boys, Green Boys, and Snake Boys. Sex has replaced drugs as the form of addiction. The Wild Boys will learn that “sex is power,” that ejaculation is a magical phenomenon charged with multiple meanings. They will learn to conceive plans at the moment of orgasm, enhancing their chance of success.

Port of Saints jumps all over the place in what appears to be a series of randomly connected scenes. A man named Kelly goes to see the American consul to recover his dead brother’s passport. Then we are in Los Alamos, “your old radioactive alma mater.” Then Burroughs’ room on Duke Street extends and opens at the sides and he is in Mexico. His lawyer, Bernabé Jurado, makes an appearance.

With the reappearance of Audrey Carsons, Burroughs introduces autobiographical reminiscing. He recalls Harbor Beach, where as a boy he spent the summers with his parents: “A cold clear day, wind from the lake. I had walked on to the railroad bridge to fish in the deep pool underneath it. Too cold to sit still, I gave up the idea of fishing and wound my line back onto a spool which I wrapped in oilcloth and shoved into my hip pocket.”

Audrey Carsons “already possessed the writer’s self-knowledge and self-disgust, and the God-guilt all writers feel in creation.” Audrey dreamed of adventure. No one wanted him anywhere. What he hoped most of all was to escape from his tainted flesh through some heroic act.

A key scene from Burroughs’ childhood, when the Los Alamos school director, Mr. Connell, came to see him in St. Louis, is reenacted and embroidered upon . His parents are out, and Jerry (another alter ego) is sitting in the living room with the director, feeling very ill at ease. The director suddenly says, “I’d like to see you stripped, Jerry.” In what follows, Burroughs reproduces the actual incident of Connell’s watching him strip, during which he experiences an embarrassing erection, but takes it further by having Connell remark, “Your little pecker is getting hard.” To which Burroughs/Jerry replies, “Well, uh, I touch it sometimes . . .” The actual scene, which is more ambiguous since Connell contents himself with watching the boy strip, is changed in Burroughs’ imagination into an overt seduction, when Connell, “with caressing fingers touches the crown of Jerry’s cock. . . . As his fingers touch Jerry feels the wet dream in his tight nuts gasping head back he goes off.”

Writing in The New Yorker, John Updike said that “Port of Saints is claptrap, but since it is murderous claptrap we feel we owe it some respect. We would like to dismiss this book but cannot, quite. A weird wit and integrity beyond corruption shine through its savage workings, and a genuine personal melancholy. The net effect Burroughs achieves is to convince us that he has seen and done things sad beyond description.” The bard of the mundane had acknowledged the poet of extreme experience.

In 1973, Exterminator! was published by Viking, Burroughs having left Grove Press with his editor, Richard Seaver. A collection of short pieces, many of them previously published in magazines, Exterminator! was somewhat disingenuously presented as a novel.

In one of the pieces, “The Discipline of DE” (Do Easy), which had to do with the right technique for doing everything correctly, Burroughs’ puritan WASP background came out of the closet. His thesis was that carelessness in small things would be repeated in large ones. In small daily occurrences lay the potential for disaster. Therefore, there was a correct technique for every activity: “Guide a dustpan lightly to the floor as if you were landing a plane.” “Don’t pull or tug at a zipper. Guide the little metal teeth smoothly along feeling the sinuous ripple of cloth and flexible metal.” “Replacing the cap on a tube of toothpaste . . . let the very tips of your fingers protrude beyond the cap contacting the end of the tube, guiding the cap into place.” “If you throw a match at a wastebasket and miss get right up and put that match in the wastebasket.”

Had he continued in this vein, Burroughs could have made a reputation for himself in the self-improvement field. What he was saying, and felt deeply, was that spilling something or breaking something was not just a moment of clumsiness but a symptom of a larger disorder. “Who or what,” Burroughs asked, “was this opponent that makes you spill drop and fumble slip and fall?” Groddeck had called it the IT, a built-in self-destructive mechanism. Hubbard called it the Reactive Mind. Burroughs had suffered its tragic consequence when the gun he had aimed at a glass had fired low. He now applied great care to every small task. DE, he believed, was helpful in all areas of life. What were illness and disability but questions of neglect? Wyatt Earp had been a practitioner of DE when he had said: “It’s not the first shot that counts. It’s the first shot that hits. Point is to draw aim and fire and deliver the slug an inch from the belt buckle.”

Still sensitive about reviews, Burroughs nursed his resentment of the hired scribes who dismissed his work. One in particular he came to detest, because although he had an obvious aversion to his books, he repeatedly insisted on reviewing them, until it got to be like a vendetta. This was Anatole Broyard of The New York Times, who reviewed Exterminator! on August 23, 1973. Since Burroughs was “the grand guru of the fictive put-on,” Broyard said, he would search his soul “for telltale signs of archaic preconceptions, uptightness, or heterosexual chauvinism. . . . every word in Exterminator! must be given the benefit of the doubt, lest I fall into the dread solecism of mistaking what Mr. Burroughs seems to be doing for what he is really up to. . . . Mr. Burroughs is such a portentous figure by now that it’s one Establishment attacking another, a bit like two middle-aged businessmen wrestling on the floor of the Century Club.”

Broyard found the book to be “a stale replay of Dr. Strangelove.” It was too bad that Burroughs had not included from his last book the last words of Dutch Schultz, which “would have introduced an all-too-invidious comparison with his own deteriorating prose style.” Referring to the final episode in Exterminator! which was called “Cold Lost Marbles,” Broyard noted an air of sincerity in the last lines, adding, “I hope it consoles him for losing his marbles.” Burroughs dearly wanted to shoot it out with Broyard at twenty paces with .45s, but a duel between an author and a reviewer was hopelessly one-sided, in that only the reviewer was armed. What, Burroughs wondered, if food critics were as devoid of consensual criteria as book critics? What if one Michelin inspector said of a restaurant, “Food superlative, service impeccable, kitchen spotless,” while another Michelin inspector said of the same restaurant, “food abominable, service atrocious, kitchen filthy.” He wondered whether there was any way a writer could settle a score with a reviewer.