20

THE BUNKER

1976-1981

THE YEARS FROM 1976 to 1981 were overshadowed for Burroughs by his son’s illness and death, but in the meantime his life went on, and he moved back and forth between Boulder and New York, and continued to write in the white and windowless environment of the Bunker, and gave readings and saw his friends.

On June 3, 1976, there was a great feast at the Bunker in honor of Allen Ginsberg’s fiftieth birthday. James Grauerholz was distressed when amid all the fellow feeling and congratulation a quarrel erupted between Allen and John Giorno over the covers of poetry albums that John had begun to produce. It was pathetic, thought James, to see them both descend to the level of personal insult, with Allen screaming abuse and John uptight and hurt and defensively babbling, “Okay, James, Allen has just said that you and William hate the album covers . . .” “Yes,” Allen interrupted, “and John just told me that you think I don’t know anything about music and that I’m an embarrassment.” Then after some more verbal sparring Allen lay back, absorbed in his thoughts, feeling good after having let out all his spleen, and feeling self-important because of his “Stop-anyone-who-disparages-the-Beat-movement-in-the-nineteen-seventies” attitude.

In the seventies the Beat movement was pretty much a memory, the granddaddy of the present punk scene, which had come out of the teenage garage bands of the late sixties, with their emphasis on adolescent nihilism and boredom. Iggy Pop and the Stooges and the New York Dolls were seen as the standard-bearers of the true garage-band sensibility, which evolved into punk rock. The punk scene flourished with the coming of age of the first generation raised on the concept of nuclear annihilation, the Soviets having announced in 1950 that they had the Bomb.

In distressing times, extravagant fringe groups emerged, such as the Incroyables during the Reign of Terror, who wore foppish clothes and disorderly hair in a style called cheveux à la victime. In the same manner, the punk subculture stressed various forms of sartorial excess and eccentric hair styles. The idealism of the sixties had evaporated, and the protest movement had died with the end of the Vietnam War.

Punk had started as a movement of disaffected teenagers. So you were a fifteen-year-old in Topeka, Kansas, sitting at home in the dark, and the warm summer air was wafting through the screen doors, and the tornado warnings were out, and you were listening to the Talking Heads, and you knew that a very different life was within range. Then it spread to New York, and became “the downtown scene,” with its performance artists, clothing designers, and filmmakers. The music headquarters was CBGB (Country, Bluegrass, and Blues), which was on the Bowery, right up the street from the Bunker. On St. Mark’s Place there was a punk boutique called Manic Panic. In 1976, Punk magazine appeared, with its “why-bother-we’re-all-doomed” sensibility, which was very Burroughsian. Punk’s special issue, “Mutant Monster Beach Party,” was also Burroughsian.

There was, however, something essentially self-defeating about “punk,” which prevented it from becoming a mass movement like the hippies. The punk “rude and ugly” style was a reaction against flower power, and a need to go beyond the excesses of the Beats and the hippies in both appearance and behavior. For a young person to “go punk” while living with his or her parents entailed heavy disapproval, so that the “punk scene” was necessarily limited to cities where extravagance was accepted. In addition, “punk” was aimless and leaderless, less a movement than a collection of hair styles. It was as if they were saying, “We have inherited the counterculture, but we don’t know where to take it.” So, in the arts, you had the artist/merchandisers, led by Andy Warhol, “the art world’s answer to McDonald’s,” with his gift for total banality.

It was Warhol who backed the Velvet Underground, who took the romanticizing of drugs to a new level of silliness. Their song “Heroin” has a user pushing “a spike into my vein” that made him “feel like Jesus’s son.” Well, thought Burroughs when he heard “I’m Waiting for the Man,” another of their songs, the one thing a drug addict would not do is chase black women. Like characters in a Burroughs novel, punk figures adopted pseudonyms, some of them taken from his novels, such as Johnny Vortex and the Inferential Kid, and sometimes not, such as Lydia Lunch and Pat Place and Rockets Redglare, who offered a dissenting opinion to the prevalent junk-punk scene with his observation that “the people who glamorize heroin are the true pornographers.”

The whole scene was a travesty, and yet Burroughs was a sort of totemic figure for the punks because of his own history as a junky. Here was this recognized author of venerable years and conservative mien, and he was a junky, too, man. Burroughs seemed to validate the taking of hard drugs. It was like Daddy giving you permission.

Burroughs himself had been off junk for years, but was forever identified through his writing as an addict. Junk was nothing but trouble, as he was reminded in a letter from his London friend, the writer Alex Trocchi, who had been burned by another figure from his past, the older but no less irresponsible Mikey Portman. “You may have heard from the grapevine,” wrote Alex, “that Mikey nearly got me crucified for supplying him with heroin. Since then my heart is a dried prune to all junky pleas.” Alex Trocchi and Mikey Portman both died in 1983, Alex of pneumonia and Mikey of a heart attack at age thirty-nine.

Burroughs was by now an established figure in New York, so established that for the first time in his life he had tax problems. He was treated, he thought, with deference—an I.R.S. agent, Miss Rhoda Guskins, made a house call to help him sort out his records. Then, in May 1977, the Village Voice arranged a meeting with Tennessee Williams in the Élysée Hotel. Both writers had been born in St. Louis, and they had met in Tangier in 1960, introduced by Paul Bowles. Burroughs had once borrowed from Paul a copy of Ten’s first collection of stories. Being on junk at the time, he dripped blood all over it while injecting himself, and Paul was annoyed. It should be quite a collector’s item, Burroughs now told the bibulous and garrulous Tennessee. They discussed the line between fiction and autobiography, and Burroughs said, “When someone asks me to what extent my work is autobiographical, I say ‘Every word is autobiographical and every word is fiction.’” They reminisced about fellow writers, and Burroughs recalled Graham Greene saying, “Of course Evelyn Waugh was a great friend of mine but we never talked about writing.”

In 1977, the scent of movie deals was in the air. Elliot Gould wanted to buy The Last Words of Dutch Schultz and play the lead. That didn’t work out, but something more solid came into view that March with the reappearance in Burroughs’ life of the man he called “the wheelchair financier,” Jacques Stern, the polio victim who was in one of his temporary periods of affluence. Through a Cayman Islands corporation he had formed, called Automatique, he proposed to pay $20,000 for a year’s option on Burroughs’ first book, Junky, to make it into a movie. He further proposed to hire Terry Southern as screenwriter and Dennis Hopper as director and star.

It seemed to James Grauerholz that with his $20,000, Jacques Stern would be buying himself a year’s worth of delusions, for Terry Southern and Dennis Hopper had the two worst reputations in Hollywood. Terry’s fondness for dope was legendary. He had a standing joke with Burroughs about a potion called Brompton’s Mixture, which combined cocaine, morphine, alcohol, cherry syrup, and water. As for Dennis Hopper, after scoring in Easy Rider, he had gone off to the Andes to make The Last Movie, a production blanketed in cocaine. He had a habit so bad that the bridge of his nose was misshapen and discolored. He used to say that he could hear the telephone wires talking to him. He had just finished shooting Apocalypse Now, and reported that Marlon Brando had refused to act opposite him, so that in their scenes together each interchange was filmed with the other actor absent. Dennis was the frenetic character in Apocalypse Now, in cowboy hat and boots and faded jeans.

But apparently the money was real, and there was always the chance that the movie might get made, even though the presence of Southern and Hopper would make it unbankable as far as backers went, so James went along with the deal. One day in March, at the apartment of Jacques Stern’s lawyer, Joe Bianco, a roly-poly prodigy who had made a fortune in commodities by the time he was twenty-three, Burroughs, Hopper, and Southern were each handed a check for $20,000 and went to a French restaurant to celebrate. “We’d better cash these fast,” Burroughs said, “’cause it’s all we’re likely to see.”

Then there was a big party at the house Jacques Stern was renting on Gramercy Park, with caviar and champagne, and James got a glimpse of what it was like to have lots of money while being completely disorganized. There was no furniture to speak of in the living room with the exception of a grand piano, and the waiters looked like bit players in a Bela Lugosi movie. Jacques had two orderlies helping him in and out of his wheelchair; he constantly cussed them out. The party was one vast shooting gallery. Joe Bianco had never seen drugs done so openly.

Stern was rolling rapidly back and forth across the living room in short spurts, the only cripple James had ever seen who could pace in his wheelchair. Then one of the orderlies handed him a hospital syringe with about 60cc’s of liquid cocaine in it, and he stuck it into his wrist and injected part of it, letting the syringe hang there like a leaf, and he started raving that he was going to get Samuel Beckett to play the part of Old Ike, and then he got on the phone with the needle still hanging from his wrist and started shouting, “Get me Paris—Samuel Beckett.” And then he was talking into the phone as though he was connected with Beckett: “Hello, Beckett—this is Jacques Stern—you’ve read Junky, by William Burroughs . . . yes, right . . . I want you to play Old Ike in a movie we’re shooting—what do you mean, you don’t want to? Well, fuck you, you old fraud!” and resoundingly hung up. Jacques often called famous people, but Joe Bianco caught him once talking to a dial tone.

It was demented, but the money was real. For the next two months they worked on the script and held continuous meetings, and James could see thousands of dollars going up various noses. Dennis Hopper was particularly trying, with his irrelevant posturing. They would be working on a scene, and Hopper would suddenly jump up and say, “I’m from Dodge City, Kansas, man, and when I was a little kid I used to be, like, in my bedroom, man, and I’d look out the window, man, and there’d be a train goin’ by, and a whistle, man, you know what I mean, man, a whistle, and that whistle was blowin’, man, it was blowin’,” and none of what he was saying had anything to do with the script, and the others would roll their eyes heavenward and wait for the stirring reminiscence to end.

Terry Southern in the meantime was ensconced in the Gramercy Park Hotel with a bevy of attractive lady typists, some of whom used only their index fingers, and was trying to impress Stern with the Hollywood technique of colored pages to show which rewrite he was on, but to James’s sorrow, he was throwing in a lot of scenes that weren’t in Junky. He had a cocktail party scene where businessmen were standing around saying things like “My company recycles used condoms,” and “Yes, we’re into bogus penicillin,” which had nothing to do with the book. The opening scene was a red mushroom cloud, which was then seen to be blood going into a syringe that a junky was injecting into his arm.

“What can happen to your script is not to be believed,” Burroughs wrote Brion Gysin on May 24. “It’s like you came back from Istanbul and there was a Dali bent watch right in the middle of your picture. You write a part for James Coburn and you wind up with Liberace.”

By that time, the expected West German financing had collapsed, leaving Jacques Stern with a budget of $1,930,522 that he could not meet. Stern’s solution was to announce a different star daily—he had signed Jack Nicholson, he had signed David Bowie. Then he would call his collaborators and heap upon them torrents of abuse. He told James he was a meddler, conspiring to keep Burroughs out of the project and “split the posthumous take.” “If I ever have the displeasure of seeing you again,” he said, “I will make it unlikely that anyone shall see you again.”

He called Burroughs and said, “I hired you as an actor, not a writer, so get out of that role. What have you produced? One trunk! That’s where you get all your shit! Haven’t done much since Naked Lunch, have you?” Burroughs just let him rave and then said, “Look, Jacques, I don’t want to listen to any more of this,” and hung up. Stewart Meyer, who was around the Bunker a lot, said that Jacques Stern had broadened his emotional range, because for the first time in his life he wanted to kill a cripple. Stern threw money your way, and he threw headaches your way. Once he called Stew at five in the morning because his wheelchair batteries were dead. “Why don’t you call the elevator man?” Stew asked. “Because he’s a C.I.A. agent,” Stern said.

The flower of Stern’s abuse was reserved for Dennis Hopper, whom he held responsible for losing the financing. When Dennis arrived forty-five minutes late at a meeting in a suite at the Hotel Carlyle, Jacques Stern refused to speak to him, and sent him snarling messages from an adjoining room through Joe Bianco, which Bianco toned down. Annoyed with Bianco, Dennis said, “Hey, you know, man, I got friends in Arizona, they carry guns, man,” to which Bianco replied, “We’re not in Arizona, Dennis, we’re in New York, and the person with friends in New York is me.” Jacques finally wheeled himself into the room, and Dennis said, “I’m sorry you feel that way, Jacques,” to which he replied: “You’re not sorry, you’re through! Finished! Fired, you miserable ass! Now get out!” with his long bony finger quavering imperiously toward the door. Dennis stomped out, which Jacques couldn’t do, but the next day, the two of them were happily snorting powder together.

Burroughs grew weary of Jacques’s manic behavior—he claimed he had a four-picture deal, that the French minister of culture was his bosom pal, and that the French film board would finance all his projects. The truth, Burroughs wrote in the same letter to Brion, was that “the Baron de Stern is an incorrigible fuckup. He can be relied on to fuck up any project in which he is involved. After he fired everybody four times with a torrent of abuse, we went to a lawyer and gave Joe Bianco control of production.”

Terry Southern in the meantime was getting his expenses paid at the Gramercy Park Hotel, with all the perks, and referred to Jacques Stern as “a grand guy . . . really a grand guy!” Behind Burroughs’ back, he and Jacques wrote a script that Terry took to Hollywood to flog, as though it had Burroughs’ endorsement, whereas Burroughs thought of it as blending “the worst features of Terry’s sophomoric humor and Jacques’ bad Italian surrealism.”

James was furious. It was enough to make him blow his lunch over the railing. He didn’t think Terry’s slapstick haw-haw-didja-get-it humor had any business in this movie. Terry was afraid to admit that mooching off Jacques for pot and speed and coke wasn’t the same thing as writing a script that played. He was showing indications of his true nature, thought James, but this fit of pique did not interfere with a warm friendship that has endured.

And then in March 1978 the option ran out and it was all over—the rushing around to these half-assed meetings, the white nights, the easy money, the dinners at One Fifth Avenue, and the telephone ravings. For a year, thought James, they had lived in the kingdom of illusion, each with a different agenda: He and William had genuinely wanted to make the movie. Dennis Hopper wanted to finance his cocaine habit. Terry Southern wanted to rehabilitate his reputation as a screenwriter by piggybacking on Burroughs. And Jacques Stern wanted to create havoc.

Stern remained in New York, except that now he was broke, and Burroughs had to bail him out on more than one occasion. Once he was summoned to a restaurant where Stern could not pay the bill. In 1979, he landed on Burroughs’ doorstep at the Bunker after starting a fire in his hotel lobby. “We’ll wheel you right out into the gutter where you belong,” the manager said. He arrived with all his stuff in laundry bags, and was carried up the stairs by the cab driver, whom Stern started insulting, and who said, “Listen, don’t get smart with me or I’ll drop you.” He gave Burroughs the name of a woman to call, but the woman said, “I cannot have this man here.” Stern commandeered the Bunker, racing around in his wheelchair like a giant insect. After a couple of days, Burroughs couldn’t stand it, decided “I’m going to walk out on this whole situation,” and left for Naropa.

In spite of the Junky fiasco, and the fact that none of his books had been made into a film, Burroughs was infiltrating popular culture in odd and various ways. In Seattle, Washington, a women’s fashion boutique called Nova Express opened. Clemson University in South Carolina asked him to write something for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe, an author with whom he had little in common. The University of Minnesota had a Burroughs Club, whose only purpose was to further the appreciation of his work. Newsweek wanted him for “My Turn.” Playgirl wanted him for “His Turn.” Quest wanted him to go to Guatemala. The gay magazines Blueboy, The Advocate, and Gay Sunshine wanted him for interviews. Patti Smith asked him to write lyrics for her songs, which he did, thinking, “Why not grab a piece of the punk action?” and which went like this:

My husband and I

The old school tie

Hyphenated names

Tired old games

It belongs in the bog

With the rest of the sog

Pull the chain on Buckingham

The drain calls you Ma’am.

BUGGER THE QUEEN.

“One has the feeling,” Burroughs wrote Paul Bowles, “of being in the middle of something here, I don’t know just what. Why, I was made an honorary citizen of Austin, Texas, by the mayor himself.” Faithful to Tangier, Paul replied: “You apparently decided to experience the rigors of the decaying culture sur place. I can believe it would be instructive, but I can’t conceive of its being enjoyable.” Then Paul proceeded to describe how life in Tangier had deteriorated now that it was no longer an international zone. Jane had died in Málaga in 1973. The muezzins now had loudspeakers at the tops of the minarets, so that the calls for prayer awakened everyone within two miles. They used to last a minute or two, and now they lasted twenty-five minutes. You could no longer find imported food in the market. There was no running water in his apartment. He had to take care of the illnesses of his servants, Fatima’s liver and Abdouahaid’s appendix, and of the various scrapes of his bad-tempered friend Mrabet. Several score of workmen were banging away across the street, building a new lycée for students who would wreck it as soon as it was up. The German tourists shuffled through the streets in close-packed groups, as if expecting a savage attack. He couldn’t keep warm in the winter, since the doors of his apartment reached only to within an inch of the floor, and the windows had been built off-kilter, and the wind blew in. He could not leave Tangier, having been arrested as a spy the last time he had traveled to another city, and having had to wait five hours in the office of the military commander of Tetouan. He was afraid to leave Morocco, as he had been told he would not be re-admitted. He couldn’t even go to Gibraltar. It was like a form of house arrest.

If those were the pleasures of life in Tangier, thought Burroughs, Paul could have them. But that was Paul, he wasn’t happy unless he had something to worry about. He wrote Paul that in New York, there were no gendarmes pounding on his door. As for Boulder, to which he had returned in March of 1978, it was “bland and innocuous, a middle-class town with no slums or minorities . . . beautiful blond boys everywhere on looks but strictly decorative rather than functional.” To Alan Ansen, who had been expelled from Venice again, just as Burroughs had been forced to leave Mexico and other venues, he wrote: “If only we could create a composite country, codeine pills from France, the liquor mart from Boulder, police from New York, boys from remote underprivileged areas, and of course all the local culinary specialties. . . . isn’t one important feature the unquestioned right to remain? One always pays for that.”

One always paid, that was the rub, and Burroughs still found himself from time to time in a cash crunch. The one advantage of places like Tangier and Athens was that they were cheap. That May, the checks started bouncing all around him like crystal skulls in a Mayan ball court. The wolves were closing in. He was about to be stripped of his credit cards when he was rescued thanks to loans from friends, his Grove Press royalty statement, a payment for a reading, a German contract, and some money from Gallimard, his French publisher. In the words of the immortal bard, Burroughs reflected, “Let us repair and order well the state that like events may ne’er it ruinate.”

That summer of 1978 he and James went to Los Angeles to visit the set of the movie Heartbeat, which was based on Carolyn Cassady’s account of her triangular affair with Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac. As they drove to their motel, the Tropicana, Burroughs observed: “The sky is thin as paper here. The whole place could go up in ten minutes. That’s the charm in Los Angeles.”

At the Universal Studio in Culver City, the set was a tract house in San Francisco with fifties furniture and kitchen and canned goods with fifties prices. The scene they were shooting had Jack, played by John Heard, coming home drunk with a black woman and trying to smuggle her past Carolyn to the attic room. The clowning, thought Burroughs, was uncannily realistic. At lunch with Nick Nolte, who was playing Neal, he asked if there was any psychic contact, and Nolte nodded, and Burroughs felt Neal sitting there in his cheap 1950s suit with the sleeves pulled up. That was what acting was all about, thought Burroughs, you had to open yourself up to possession by the character.

After lunch, he watched a scene where they learn that Allen Ginsberg’s book of poems Howl has been seized by customs, and Neal says, “All it’s going to do is make him famous, the poor bastard.” Allen had not wanted his name used, because (for one thing) of a fictitious scene in a Thai restaurant where they had him shouting, “Waiter, there’s a turd in my soup,” so his character was called Ira Streiker. Nonetheless, as Burroughs watched the scene, the past hung in the air. There were multiple takes, and at one point, the director, John Byrum, broke his absorbed indifference to the visitors’ presence by saying, “And you think you’ve had chaos in your life, Mr. Burroughs.”

The visit to the set started Burroughs thinking that in Jack Kerouac there had been a lifelong incompatibility between his uneasy surface presentation of a nice, regular American who liked beer and Mom and TV and baseball, who worked as a brakeman and wanted to settle down with Carolyn Cassady, and the spy in his body, the writer whose status as a regular guy is belied by an obsessive need to write about it. Who had killed Neal Cassady, Burroughs asked himself? The character that Jack made of him in On the Road, Dean Moriarty, killed Neal Cassady. He had died of exposure. And who had killed Jack Kerouac? A spy in his body known as Jack Kerouac the writer.

At this point, James Grauerholz was going through another crisis and decided to spend some time in San Francisco by himself. He had now been with Burroughs four years, and periodically got upset by the frustrations built into the job. As long as he worked for Burroughs, he would not be able to pursue his own goal of a career in music. There were also periods of heavy drinking when James, himself no teetotaler, could not bear to be around him, and left notes such as this: “It breaks my heart to see you drink yourself into an insensible stupor. If you wish to die perhaps it were better you killed yourself outright. You said to me once, about Kerouac, ‘If a man wants to drink himself to death, there’s nothing you can do.’ It hurts me very much either way. Do What Thou Wilt—and do you really want to present this sorry spectacle of a mumbling, incoherent, and repetitive old man?”

What to do? James didn’t want to just leave, which would be disloyal. Burroughs depended on him in a hundred different ways. He would have to groom someone to take his place. Fed up with New York and its distraction factor, James thought of moving to Lawrence, Kansas, where he had gone to college and had friends. It would be like a return to innocence. He could continue to manage Burroughs’ affairs from Lawrence until a replacement was found. The question was, would he be a nobody, living in Burroughs’ reflected glory, or would he be somebody on his own? In the meantime, he would do one final thing to elevate Burroughs’ name even further.

It happened that not long before the trip to Los Angeles, a Columbia professor named Sylvere Lotringer had approached John Giorno about organizing some sort of “homage to Burroughs,” bringing together European and American academics for a series of seminars. Lotringer saw Burroughs as they did in France, where he was acclaimed as a philosopher of the future, the man who best understood postindustrial society.

Giorno discussed the idea with James, and they saw it more as a gathering of the counterculture tribe which would enshrine Burroughs as its leader. There would be seminars, but there would also be music and entertainment, and star attractions. It would be something to cap the decade, a memorable New York Event. James wanted to call it the Nova Convention, which Giorno at first didn’t like because it reminded him of the car put out by Chevrolet, but he went along with it.

And so, over the next months, they organized the Nova Convention. On the Los Angeles trip, James obtained some seed money from Tom Forcade of the magazine High Times. In the Palace nightclub in Paris, Brion Gysin ran into Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who admired Burroughs and said he would like to be a part of it. Giorno, who was designing the poster, was happy to hear that, and headlined Keith’s name, because he was a big draw.

Volunteers were recruited to help put the show on the road, among them a 115-pound bundle of sometimes irritating energy by the name of Victor Bockris, who looked like an adult foundling. English-born, Victor was the son of scientists, his father being a professor of physics and his mother a laboratory technician working on leukemia research. He moved to New York in 1973, attracted by the lifestyle of people who lived on the Lower East Side and didn’t have jobs. With a friend named Andrew Wylie, Victor started an interview team. The idea was that they would be dapper and businesslike, and wear Brooks Brothers pinstripe suits, and carry rolled umbrellas and attaché cases, and that Bockris & Wylie would become as eminent in their field as Abercrombie & Fitch were in theirs.

In early 1974 they arranged to interview Burroughs, but when he first saw them he thought they were C.I.A. agents. Trying again, they invited him to dinner and did their nice cop/tough cop interview routine. Describing the shooting of his wife, Burroughs said, “Well, it was a shaky gun,” to which Wylie replied, “Maybe you had a shaky hand.” James deleted so much of what was in the drunken interview that it was unpublishable, and there were other problems with an interview that Mick Jagger would not release, so that in 1975 Bockris and Wylie came to an acrimonious parting of the ways. They had become known for their access to celebrities—calling up thirty-five of the famous and asking them, “Do you believe in love?” or “What does Nixon think about just before he goes to sleep?”

Bockris saw the Nova Convention as a means of further incorporating himself into the Burroughs entourage by running errands and being generally helpful. He was able in this way to make the transition from journalist to familiar, and soon Burroughs was fondly teasing him: “May I make a suggestion, Victor? I think it would be a very good idea if you would remove the phrase ‘and stuff’ from your vocabulary.”

The Nova Convention took place on November 30, December 1, and December 2, 1978, with the principal performances being held on the last two days at the Entermedia Theater, on Second Avenue and Twelfth Street, which had in the fifties been the fabled Phoenix Theater. Attending were an odd mixture of academics, publishers, writers, artists, punk rockers, counterculture groupies, and an influx of bridge-and-tunnel kids drawn by Keith Richards, who made the event a sellout.

Acting as mistresses of ceremonies were two diminutive young ladies in top hats and tails, Julia Heyward and Laurie Anderson, who was soon to win fame as a performance artist. Brion Gysin, who had been flown in from Paris to perform one of his cut-up poems, was horrified at seeing “these two terrible cunts dressed up like men.” Laurie Anderson was John Giorno’s discovery. He recognized her raw talent and sense of purpose. She was, he said, a ruthless whippet, totally dedicated to the task at hand, and didn’t drink or smoke pot. Someone told Giorno: “You know, Laurie Anderson’s dimples? Well, William Burroughs is the other side of her dimples.” All went well that evening, with performances from Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham.

On Saturday afternoon, there was a panel moderated by the conceptual artist Les Levine, including Burroughs, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson, during which Burroughs gave what amounted to the convention’s keynote speech. “This is the Space Age,” he said, “and we’re here to go. However, the Space Program has to this day been restricted to a mediocre elite, who at great expense have gone to the moon in an aqualung. They aren’t really looking for Space, they’re looking for more time, like the lungfish and the walking catfish weren’t looking for a new dimension—they were looking for more water. It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary—and becoming increasingly difficult—to live.”

That was what he loved about Burroughs, thought Les Levine—he allowed for some level of mystery in human life, he accepted that not everything was known. It was amazing to Les how Burroughs could be on the one hand like a provocateur and on the other like your grandfather. He was a Midwestern moralist with a few peculiar habits, conventionally dressed, not given to flash or flip, very prim and proper. He had a sometimes Archie Bunkerish view of the world, as when he had told Les that painters made too much money and were ripping off the public. It was paradoxical that this man who was associated with the Beats and their abandoned living was one of the most conservative persons he had ever met.

Les felt that the Nova Convention, this broad counterculture coalition of the old established avant-garde and the new punk scene, had crowned Burroughs king. In the heat of enthusiasm that afternoon, someone—was it the English publisher John Calder?—had jumped up and nominated him for the Nobel Prize. To the counterculture Burroughs was what John Kennedy was to the liberals. He embodied its values and summed it all up. When you said “Kennedy,” as when you said “Burroughs,” it was a magic word.

Saturday night the Entermedia Theater was packed, largely with young people waiting to see Keith Richards. There was a small hitch, however, which was that Keith Richards had canceled. He was having problems as the result of a heroin bust in Toronto, and his office convinced him that appearing on the same program with Burroughs was bad publicity.

But the show had to go on, and the composer Philip Glass, playing one of his repetitive pieces on the synthesizer, was thrown to the wolves. The disappointed kids who wanted Keith Richards shouted and booed. Then Brion Gysin went on amid cries of “Where’s Keith?” and found himself hoping that the riot would not start until he had done his brief turn.

In a last-minute effort, James Grauerholz had recruited Frank Zappa to pinch-hit for Keith. He volunteered to read the “talking asshole” routine from Naked Lunch. But as Zappa was preparing to go on, Patti Smith had a fit of pique about following him. James did his best to make peace, saying, “Frank has come in at the last minute, and he’s got to go on, and he’s doing it for William, not to show you up.” Patti Smith retreated to the privacy of her dressing room, and Zappa got a big hand, because that’s what they wanted, a rock star.

Still, no one had explained Keith Richards’s absence, and it was Patti Smith who gamely bit the bullet. She came out in a fur coat and a pair of genuine iguana-skin cowboy boots. When she announced that she was going to tell a story, a heckler shouted, “Tell it to the iguana.” For Patti Smith, every performance was like a bullfight, the ultimate confrontation, as well as an act of lovemaking with the audience, which she sometimes achieved by masturbating on stage under a fur coat with a slit pocket. In 1976 she was doing something of the sort in Tampa when she fell off the stage and broke her neck. Soon she was back at CBGB’s—Out of Traction, Back in Action. On this occasion, she did the heroic thing, telling her audience, “I know you guys came in to see Keith . . . well, Keith ain’t here . . . he’s in a plane right now between L.A. and Toronto . . . he asked me to tell you all that if anybody wants their money back they can come and get it right now . . . ,” and she pulled some bills out of her pocket, but there were no takers. Although ill with bronchitis and running a fever, she hadn’t stood them up. She couldn’t sing, but she noodled around on the clarinet.

In the meantime, Burroughs was backstage waiting to read, and smoking joints with Terry Southern and Victor Bockris in his dressing room. Marcia Resnick, a photographer of the punk scene, dropped in and sat on Terry’s lap. “She’d be much safer sitting in my lap,” Burroughs said, and Bockris stood on a shelf across the small room to take a picture of the Great Misogynist with a cute punk chick in his lap. At that moment James walked in, and in his best Nurse Ratchett manner asked, “What is going on here?” Bockris fell and spilled his wine all over Burroughs. By that time, the audience had quieted down, and John Giorno read without too many interruptions, and Burroughs went out and read to a warm welcome.

Afterward, there was a party at Mickey Ruskin’s, at One University Place, which featured a big aluminum washtub filled with “Guyana punch” (vodka and Kool-Aid), and Burroughs made some appropriately sardonic remarks about Jonestown, which was then in the news. Abbie Hoffman, who was wanted by the police, attended in disguise. Later in the evening, Tim Leary got pied by Aaron Kay, the professional pie-thrower, who had Mayor Koch and Andy Warhol to his credit. Burroughs told him that being pied by Kay was a sign that one had arrived. Leary took it well, saying, “Kay is wired to pie like a crow is to fly or a mole to dig.”

James thought the Nova Convention had been a resounding success. The media coverage was extensive and appreciative, hailing the event as a high point in the Punk–New Wave movement, the attendance was standing room only, and Burroughs, after so many years of obscurity and exile, was recognized as the leading figure in the counterculture.

Perhaps the success of the Nova Convention was an example of the way the avant-garde had refined the modern consciousness, a bit like the monks preserving the classics in the Middle Ages. But now that the social freedoms pioneered by the counterculture were available to everyone, what was its purpose? Its leaders had gone from being outcasts whose works were banned to successful literary men who were wined and dined and decorated. The great maw of American society, with its capacity to ingest and tame its enemies, had absorbed the counterculture. As an example, Allen Ginsberg had been elected to the Institute of Arts and Letters, and in February 1979, he was awarded the Gold Medal for literary merit by the National Arts Club. Attending the award dinner, Burroughs was amused to see that the little old club ladies were shocked when he read “Cocksucker Blues.” If they could have taken their medal back, he thought, they would have. But the very fact that Allen could read the poem in the dignified Gramercy Square headquarters of the club was proof that the literary outlaws were being mainstreamed and co-opted. They had brought about changes in the culture, and the changed culture was now willing, nay, eager, to adopt them.

Burroughs, however, maintained his avant-garde credentials with books like The Third Mind, a defense and explanation of the cut-up method, written in collaboration with Brion Gysin, which Viking published in 1978. The idea for the title came from a book called Think and Grow Rich, which said that when you put two minds together there is always a third mind. It was also a reference to a line by T. S. Eliot, “Who is the third that walks beside you?” which referred to the hallucination of two Arctic explorers, who imagined that a third person was with them. While at Grove, Dick Seaver had for years kept the boards for collages and graphics in his office, and every time he looked at them it made him think of Burroughs’ theory “that one plus one equals three.” He didn’t know how they could publish this huge oversize book that would cost thirty dollars. But then Seaver had moved to Viking, and started his own imprint, Seaver Books, with his wife, Jeannette, and decided to bring out The Third Mind, but with only a few illustrations.

In March 1979, James moved to Lawrence, telling Burroughs he needed a change of scene. It would not be a break. It would be a sabbatical, and he would continue to manage Burroughs’ affairs. James felt trapped in his role. He had closed so many doors. He wanted once more to experience a broad range of possibilities. He had to get away from New York and the entourage and the bungled projects like the Junky film. He needed a sense of renewal.

Now Burroughs was alone in the Bunker, missing James, and still faced with the ongoing nightmare of Billy’s transplant. The vacuum that James left was filled by several friends. John Giorno, who lived in the building, took on some of the duties of looking after him, often cooking dinner. He was a benign and unobtrusive presence that Burroughs appreciated. He was like a cat, thought Giorno, expecting the food to be there at a certain time. Then there was Victor Bockris, who moved in with his “come-see-the-bear-dance” routine. Victor brought around celebrities to meet Burroughs, acting as introducer, go-between, and master of ceremonies. John Giorno provided the bread, and Victor Bockris the circuses. He would call and say, “I’ll be over at six with some corned beef and Bianca Jagger.” It was in a sense a useful function to fulfill, for Burroughs was entertained, and Victor became to some extent the arranger of his social life. On the other hand, Burroughs was expected to perform at Victor’s evenings, and to be ever more outrageous. Victor was of course motivated by fondness for Burroughs, as well as self-advancement. As Stew Meyer put it, Victor may have been an opportunist, but he was a helpful opportunist.

A disciple of Warhol’s techniques in From A to B and Back and other books of unrelieved verbatim transcription, Bockris had a book project of conversations with Burroughs and whoever else happened to be around, often through his arrangement. Published by Seaver Books in 1981, it was called With William Burroughs: Report from the Bunker, and was a useful chronicle of that period of Burroughs’ life.

On one occasion, Victor brought around Christopher Isherwood, and when they went into a Bowery bar to call Burroughs to be let in, the author of Mr. Norris Changes Trains said, “Oh, my dear, it’s so Eugene O’Neill! I mean it’s just so absolutely The Iceman Cometh.”

Victor brought around the wildlife photographer Peter Beard, to whom Burroughs gave a fanciful explanation of his missing finger.

“How did you lose your finger?” Beard asked.

“Oh, er, an explosion,” Burroughs said. “Nearly blew my whole hand off. . . . But I had a very good surgeon.”

“Was that a gun explosion?” Bockris asked.

“No, it was, er, chemical—potassium chlorate and red phosphorus.”

“What were you doing with it?” Beard asked.

“Chemicals,” Burroughs said. “I was fourteen years old.”

“Did you feel any pain?”

“Oh yes, I did. The doctor had to give me a morphine injection which he said was almost an adult dose. Yes indeed, I’ve been addicted ever since.”

In fact Burroughs had remained unaddicted since arriving in New York in 1974, but with James gone, that situation, too, was about to change. For in 1979, inexplicably, heroin suddenly became plentiful and inexpensive in the streets of New York. You could find it on every corner, at ten dollars a dose instead of thirty dollars. On Rivington Street, right across from the Bunker, there was a major dealer known as “Dr. Nova,” after Nova Express.

Among the punk crowd, it was cool to be a junky. Many of the punk musicians were on heroin. And now that the Bunker had become a gathering place for all sorts of punk scene people, heroin made its appearance there. Offering heroin to Burroughs, the patriarch of junk, seemed a natural thing to do, like offering an apple to Johnny Appleseed. As noted in Stew Meyer’s journal, it wasn’t long after James’s departure for Lawrence that Burroughs started chipping. On March 13, he noted that Burroughs was on a health food kick, smack and steak, shoot some smack and chew some steak. Burroughs was staring vacantly at the wall and saying: “Nothing comes out of the clear blue sky. You’ve got your memory track, everything you’ve seen and heard.” On April 7, Stew noted that Burroughs was using heroin again for the first time in many years. Finding roaches in the kitchen, he snapped at them with a towel, saying, “Mother of God, kill them, they’re an abomination.”

Stew was glad to be in the daily company of “the doctor,” as he called Burroughs, even if the occasion was caused by heroin. The truth was, the doctor was uncomfortable on this planet and junk relieved him. He wasn’t basically atrocious enough to be well-adjusted, and he had a certain contempt for “the insect servants,” as he so diplomatically referred to earthlings.

Dispirited over his son’s inability to make a life for himself after his transplant operation, Burroughs was back on the junk time he had himself so eloquently described, when your whole day revolves around scoring and shooting up. When James came to visit in June, he saw at once what was going on—not only had he lost a lot of weight, but his junky friends would arrive and go into a room with him and close the door. Also, James noticed a serious outflow of cash in his Citibank account.

It saddened him to find this pathetic scene that was focused entirely on junk, with those awful dispiriting junky conversations: “It wasn’t as strong as last time, man,” or “This is kind of head stuff, man,” or “Remember that stuff we had last week?” or “That other guy gives a better count, man.” But after all, James thought, I’m not his nursemaid. When he did try to say something, Burroughs was very defensive, and James went back to Lawrence.

So life at the Bunker continued, with runners bringing glassine envelopes, and assorted visitors, some well known and some obscure, shooting up. One of the young regulars was badly beaten for stealing steaks to finance his habit, and another passed bad checks. Burroughs rarely went out, except that on September 14, Frank Zappa, who wanted to produce an off-Broadway musical based on Naked Lunch, took him to see Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It was a soft audience, thought Burroughs; they laughed at everything.

On October 25, according to Stew Meyer’s journal, someone brought around cocaine, and Burroughs said, “Put it away, we don’t have to feed every vacant nostril in town.” On November 30, Stew and Burroughs got high together and Stew presented the idea that Fagin in Oliver Twist was really a hero because he was keeping all these kids from starving to death. But Burroughs said his reasoning was too twisted, it was like trying to make a hero out of Iago.

On New Year’s Eve, there was a party at John Giorno’s, with hashish brownies, of which Burroughs and Stew took ample portions. They did some heroin to hold them while waiting for the brownies to hit. Other guests arrived, and Burroughs smoked joints and drank vodka. Stew was amazed at the amount of drugs and booze Burroughs could handle without apparent ill effect. After all, the man was almost sixty-six years old. Burroughs, however, held that there was no medical evidence that the use of opiates damaged the health or shortened life. De Quincey, an addict for forty years, had lived to be seventy-four. It was the failure of addicts to observe rules of hygiene that did them in.

During dinner, a visiting Swiss publisher, Carl Laszlo, started choking on a piece of steak and fell on the couch gasping. Burroughs thought they would have to improvise a tracheotomy with a kitchen knife à la Dr. Benway, and Anne Waldman started praying. Allen Ginsberg said, “Call an ambulance,” but Burroughs thought, try to get an ambulance on New Year’s Eve. Someone tried the Heimlich maneuver, squeezing the diaphragm to force the food up, but that didn’t work, and Laszlo was gasping for breath and turning blue in the face. Then they tried the reverse Heimlich above the diaphragm, and the piece of steak loosened and went down. After a short rest downstairs in the Bunker, Laszlo returned, joking that “it is not nice to die at a party, it is nicer to die at home.”

By this time, Burroughs had finished the novel he had been working on since 1974, Cities of the Red Night, and had sent a typescript to Brion Gysin to look at. Brion urged him to delete a couple of phrases that he felt would be construed as anti-Semitic, to which Burroughs replied: “As regards the Jew jokes . . . there is no basis to assume that opinions expressed by a writer’s characters are the opinions of the writer. You have a Nazi character, he is going to talk like a Nazi. . . . Look at my other books—Naked Lunch: ‘All a Jew wants to do is diddle a Christian girl.’ Nova Express: ‘Take your ovens with you and pay Hitler on the way out. Nearly got the place hot enough for you Jews, didn’t he?’ Exterminator!: ‘And I want to say this to followers of the Jewish religion. We like nice Jews with Jew jokes so watch yourself Jewboy or we’ll cut the rest of it off.’ In Cities, Hitler Jugend boys sing ‘And the dance that they do is enough to kill a Jew.’ Well, what would one expect from Hitler Jugend boys?”

Burroughs told Brion that he had full confidence in his editor, Dick Seaver, who had paid a $25,000 advance. He was, second to Beckett, the most prestigious author that Seaver had brought to his new employer, Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Anyway, he wasn’t writing for the Book-of-the-Month ladies and would lose his present readers if he tried. He was not trying to be a commercial writer, he was trying to be the best writer. He wasn’t going to change a scene to sell books or get a review in The New Yorker. Concession was the thin edge of a very thick wedge. At the same time, he assured Brion, he wasn’t an anti-Semite at all. “With Reagan and these born-again assholes putting in their two cents’ worth,” he wrote, “us minorities have to stick together.” He recalled his embarrassment when someone had said about The New Yorker, “Smart bunch of kids run that mag. Went to school with ’em.” It took him awhile to register that the person had said “yids,” not kids.

From Paris, Brion lamented his lack of success. He didn’t have a dealer for his paintings. The art dealers told him he was too avant-garde. They were interested only in art objects they could sell over the phone. On the poetry scene, he wanted to see his songs published, but didn’t know who to turn to. His problem was that he didn’t work nearly hard enough at his various careers. Any one of them would be flourishing if he devoted full time to it but he didn’t and things slipped away. He should work only at paintings, but went on writing instead.

In the Bunker, Burroughs was still on heroin, an old junky with a translucent skin and collapsed veins. Allen Ginsberg tried to connect him with boys, but Burroughs said: “Why would a good-looking kid want to make it with me? I look like something out of Bergen-Belsen.” He was back to staring at his big toe—the sluggishness, the lack of interest in anything but the next shot. Addiction was a horror and a bore. He thought of De Quin-cey’s struggle to reduce his laudanum intake to one gram a day, which he called “weaning from laud.” As De Quincey had long ago observed, opiates “defeat the steady habit of exertion.” Except that in Burroughs’ case that was not quite true, for he had started working on his next book, Place of Dead Roads, and found that he could work quite well on heroin. In fact, he worked better with it than without it.

Early in 1980, a young man named David Dalton asked Burroughs to contribute an article to a book he was editing to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Rolling Stones. Burroughs agreed, even though he didn’t much like their music and thought Mick Jagger was arrogant. But when he got it down on paper, my God, it was dull—“Rock ’n’ roll music is a sociological phenomenon of unprecedented scope and effect”—that sort of thing. Burroughs confided to Victor Bockris that the article didn’t work, and Victor, who continued to bring people around, most recently David Bowie and Joe Strummer, the lead singer for the Clash, said he would arrange a dinner at the Bunker with Mick Jagger, so that Burroughs could chat with him, and that he would also ask Andy Warhol and the photographer Marcia Resnick.

March 9 was the evening of the great face-off between Jagger and Burroughs. Andy Warhol arrived first, soon followed by Marcia Resnick, who began setting up strobe lights, as though she was shooting a movie. Victor told her to stash her lights or she would wreck the evening. Mick arrived in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln sedan with his future bride, Jerry Hall, and another woman. They sat down at the conference table in the Bunker’s large main room, as Mick fidgeted with suspicion. “What is the purpose of this dinner?” his eyes seemed to be saying. It soon became apparent that he knew nothing about David Dalton’s project, so Burroughs brought up his name, to which Warhol responded, “Oh, he’s one of my best friends.” Glancing warily around, Mick asked why Marcia Resnick was taking pictures. “I’m documenting the event,” she responded.

Informed about Dalton’s book idea, Mick suggested that it could just as well be Andy’s twentieth anniversary, since Andy must have been doing something for the last twenty years.

Bockris, trying to get the evening back on track, said, “I think it would be nice to have dinner regardless of this misunderstanding,” to which everyone agreed.

“Bill’s so great,” Andy said, “I’m trying to find some young boys for him.”

Burroughs then attempted to explain to Mick what he had in mind—his article would say that a book could sell hundreds of thousands of copies, while pop music immediately reached millions of people.

Mick, in his surly way, said that television and movies were more effective than rock ’n’ roll.

Burroughs said that rock music, like the cultural revolution, was concerned with confrontation between the performer and the audience.

Mick said he thought that was passé.

“Aren’t you actually paid to confront your audience?” Burroughs asked. “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

Mick wasn’t buying it, and asked, “What is this cultural revolution you’re talking about?”

Gripping the arms of his chair, and speaking with slow deliberation as if to a backward child, Burroughs said: “Do you realize that thirty or forty years ago a four-letter word could not appear on a printed page? You’re asking what cultural revolution? Holy shit, man, what’d you think we’ve been doing all these years?”

“He’s young enough that he doesn’t think about it,” Andy said. “A lot of people don’t think about it.”

“Pop music was one of the key things in the whole cultural revolution,” Burroughs persisted. “Every time they got busted for drugs we got that much closer to decriminalization of pot all over the world because it was becoming a household word.”

Looking supremely bored, Mick asked, “Is there a phone in this joint?”

When he returned from his call, Victor desperately tried to keep the conversation going, asking, “Well, Bill, when did you last see the Rolling Stones?”

“Mick’s farewell in England at the Roundhouse,” Burroughs said.

Perhaps recalling that Burroughs had declined to attend his wedding, Mick said rather pointedly that they had only met twice since and had spoken on neither occasion.

“I wouldn’t say that, Mick,” Burroughs said.

Then Victor said that Andy had recently been shot and that Burroughs had once shot someone, and Mick asked, “Who did you shoot?” and Burroughs said: “I haven’t shot anyone right lately, Mick. Been on my good behavior.”

Mick got up and said he had to go, and there were perfunctory handshakes and farewells. He had stayed all of fifteen minutes. Good riddance, thought Burroughs. He was convinced that Mick had bent over backward to be as obnoxious as possible, pretending to know nothing about the project, as if he was being tricked into something. It was the petulant paranoia of the superstar. In his dull-normal mind, he must have equated Burroughs with junk, and since Keith Richards had already had too much publicity in that department, he didn’t want Burroughs writing about the Stones. So he had made very sure that he would sabotage the project, and in that he had succeeded. Well, that was one article he wouldn’t have to write.

A disappointed Bockris turned on Marcia Resnick: “Marcia, you weren’t supposed to be taking photographs during the conversation! How can people talk if someone is running around taking photographs the whole time?”

Burroughs in 1980 continued to find relief in heroin. That April, according to Stew Meyer’s journal, he was high one night in the Bunker and going on about how fucked up the white race was. They were the only ones who had an army before they had an enemy, he said. The Indians weren’t ready but the Anglos were. It was the old game of Castle Keep.

Addiction did not prevent him from giving readings, however, since in most cities he could score, and on April 9 he met James Grauerholz in Los Angeles. James was in one of those hexed periods where everything goes wrong. In Lawrence, he had broken his jaw in a fall from his bicycle, and it had to be wired shut for four weeks. At his father’s place in Coffeyville, he had crushed the tip of his left index finger moving some limestone rocks. In Los Angeles, he reached into his shaving kit and nearly cut off the tip of his right index finger on a loose razor.

But all that was trivial compared to his father’s collapse. Alvin Grauerholz—pillar of the community, vice-commander of the American Legion, onetime candidate for lieutenant governor of Kansas—suffered a complete nervous breakdown in February 1980 and was admitted to the psychiatric ward in the Veterans Hospital in Topeka, where he remained nine months. It developed that there had been some kind of misappropriation of funds in two estates that he was managing, and two charges of felony theft adding up to $30,000 were filed against him upon his release from the hospital.

The trial took place in Coffeyville in the summer of 1981. The attempted defense was insanity, which in Kansas is not a winning strategy. Al Grauerholz was convicted, his appeal was rejected, and at the sentencing in 1983 the district judge took a harsh view of his continued refusal to admit that the money had been deliberately stolen—Al insisted that he had borrowed it and intended to replace it. This broken man in his sixties was sentenced to two to six years in the state pen in Lansing. He served six weeks before a new lawyer obtained probation, and is now living in West Texas, still on probation, and sells encyclopedias for a living.

The father-son role was reversed. At the age of twenty-eight, James became his father’s legal guardian, and had to show him the love and guidance one would show a child. He wrapped up his father’s law business, liquidated his assets, and returned the $30,000 to the two estates. It was a harrowing time, and, as he put it, in spite of the ancient family conditioning, the bile turbines were on full throttle. He felt that he was being pulled apart like taffy, with his father in Topeka, Billy Burroughs in Denver, and Burroughs in New York, each with his critical problem, claiming his attention.

Caught up in his father’s crisis, James was not monitoring Burroughs’ heroin addiction as closely as he would have liked. As Stew Meyer put it, “We started taking it, and when the smoke cleared we were on the nod. James was away and the mice were playing. If he had been there none of this would have happened. We needed a stabilizing factor. We fucked up our cash flow. I was a partner in a printing business, and that came to an end, and so did my marriage, and the walls came tumbling down.”

In what would be remembered as “the wild summer of 1980,” things got completely out of hand. One night Stew Meyer and Burroughs were out with some Italian heroin dealers in a revved-up red Mustang. The driver was high and the tires were screeching, and Stew was thinking, “This is great, there are guns in the car and an ounce of heroin, and old Dominick is doing seventy miles per hour through the East Village, and I’m gonna read about it tomorrow in the Daily News, under the headline ‘Author Arrested with Drug Dealers’!” So Stew said, “Take it easy, you’ll upset Bill,” but Bill was looking out the window and smiling contentedly, not upset at all.

It was far too dangerous for Burroughs himself to score in the battle zone of Alphabet City (avenues A, B, and C), so that Stew and other friends attended to that. Jim Prince, a boyish twenty-five-year-old would-be writer who had become a Bunker regular, was sent out on numerous missions. He was slightly built but gracefully feline in a preppy way. Prince would find a message on his answering machine in Burroughs’ unmistakable twang: “Ahh, the electricity’s out, I need three light bulbs,” which meant three bags of heroin. Prince would bring over the smack and Burroughs would open the door before he knocked, saying, “I felt you coming from downstairs.” His veins had receded through age and addiction, and he only had two good ones left, one in his hand and one in his foot, and since it was his right hand, Prince had to inject him. He didn’t mind doing his hand, but every once in a while he would have to do his foot, which made him feel like Nurse Prince. After he’d had his injection Burroughs would come alive again, and be quite warm and affectionate, and then he would lapse into silence and just sit there and stare.

Alphabet City was a jungle, with literally dozens of competing drug crews working out of abandoned buildings. The best time to score, Jim learned, was between seven and eight in the morning, where there was a busy traffic of customers on their way to work. He would wait in line with Wall Street types in three-piece suits, sanitation workers with their garbage trucks parked outside, and mailmen wheeling their canvas bags, all scoring for heroin and cocaine. You got to know a crew, but then you’d hear that down the street the product was better, or they gave a better count (more for your money), and you tried that.

One evening Jim went down to score two bags, dressed as usual in a sports jacket, shirt, and tie. He walked through a hole in the wall into a room where five guys stood in a semicircle. One of them said, “That’s him,” and the next thing Jim knew, a half-Hispanic and half-Oriental dude dressed in white pants, white shirt, and white bandanna had wheeled around and given him a karate kick in the chest. Jim knew that it was all too easy to get killed in a case of mistaken identity, so he picked himself up and started running—he was in fair shape, because before taking heroin he had been running five to ten miles a day. He felt them close behind, he could sense the fingers trying to grab him, and he didn’t stop running until he got to First Avenue, the demarcation line between the drug jungle and the rest of the city.

Another time, trying out a new crew, he gave his money to the “cake-taker” and was told to climb six floors to the roof of the building and walk across a plank to the next building. He found himself on a plank sixteen inches wide and ten feet long, crossing over a six-floor drop to concrete and broken glass, the plank trembling beneath his sneakers, and on the other side he was handed the machine-tucked and sealed glassine envelope of beige powder. He brought the envelope back to Burroughs, who took out the spoon where he cooked the powder, squirted in the water, shot up, and dabbed his hand with cotton. He saved the cottons, saying that if he was ever caught short, “at least I got a cotton shot.”

On the Fourth of July, according to Stew Meyer’s journal, at a party in the Bunker, Burroughs was stoned and made a rambling and disconnected toast, sounding like one of his cut-ups: “I’d like to take this moment to thank George Washington for the utterly bestial strategy of attacking on God’s birthday . . . if you can’t win why play and if you can’t be horrendous find another game. . . . All right, gentlemen, line up neatly and commence firing. . . . War was a gentleman’s game in those days, not like now when it’s just an excuse to depopulate areas for moneyed interests.”

Then it was off to Santa Fe for the D. H. Lawrence festival, where he was one of the honored guests. At the panel Burroughs was on, the long-winded Leslie Fiedler held the floor, saying that Lawrence had no followers. Burroughs couldn’t get a word in, and finally Allen Ginsberg interceded, saying that Burroughs had a point to make. Burroughs said that he had been very influenced by Lawrence’s book on Mexico, The Plumed Serpent. His voice dripping with sarcasm, Fiedler said, “I always thought you have been more influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs than by Lawrence.” Well, thought Burroughs, Fiedler’s novel, Back to China, had been described by a reviewer as “a mire of baloney.”

Then in August, Burroughs left with John Giorno to attend an international poetry festival in Italy, which was being held on the sands of Castelporziano near Ostia, the ancient port of imperial Rome, and which turned out to be a reunion of the counterculture abroad, with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Anne Waldman, and LeRoi Jones. Poets had arrived from all over the world, with Yevtushenko representing the Soviet Union, and were put up at a seaside hotel. The Italians had built a big wooden stage on the beach, with lighting towers, and an estimated 35,000 attended, sitting in the dunes facing the ocean. There was a carnival atmosphere, with vendors circulating through the crowd, and meat grilling over spits.

The audience, however, soon grew restive. When an eighty-year-old Sicilian poet went on at tiresome length, there were cries of bastante (enough). With the non-Italians, there was the added problem of translation. Yevtushenko wisely read in Italian, but when Brion Gysin took stage center and read his “British Bards Abroad—John Keats died in Rome, waiting for money from home,” he was heckled. Burroughs kept it short, just two minutes, which, with translation, came to four minutes, and got a good hand. But by the time Giorno came on the audience had begun filling empty beer cans with sand and hurling them on stage like grenades, and he found himself ducking as well as reading. Then a Russian poet got up and said, “All flags are shit except for the flag of the Soviet Union,” which prompted some right-wing disrupters to carry a caldron of soup onto the stage, as they shouted, “Minestrone, non poesia.” Peter Orlovsky, who was known for his strength, single-handedly removed the caldron amid catcalls, thrown bottles, and fistfuls of sand whipping across the stage. A full-fledged riot was about to erupt when Allen Ginsberg leapt to his feet and with outstretched arms intoned a ceaseless Ommmmmmmm. The audience picked it up and calmed down, the multitude was pacified, and the evening was saved. The next day the festival wound up without incident, except that John Giorno suddenly felt the stage begin to tremble and ran to the edge and jumped off, twelve feet into the sand, as it collapsed in a pile of wood and broken glass. It was like a wild scene in a Fellini movie.

After the poetry festival, Burroughs went to St. Louis to film scenes of his childhood with the documentary filmmaker Howard Brookner. Visiting Pershing Avenue, he found an intact 1920s time pocket, with even the posts at Hortense Place that he used to jump from as a boy still the same. His brother, Mort, joked that now that he was wearing a pacemaker he had given up weight lifting. Filmed by Brookner, Mort said that he had never read his brother’s books, finding them gratuitously offensive.

When Burroughs was back in the Bunker that September of 1980, the heroin problem had to be faced. For some time, a friend of Victor’s named Ira Jaffe had been urging him to go on the methadone program. Jaffe, a counselor for the New York State Division of Substance Abuse Services, was convinced that methadone was a solution for Burroughs, because he could take his daily dose and lead a normal life, and not be trapped in the addict subculture, where you were on junk time, and everything was related to scoring and shooting up. Also, with the stuff off the street you never knew what you were getting. It wasn’t healthy for a man of Burroughs’ age, and too expensive for a man of his limited means. So every time he saw Burroughs, Ira Jaffe mentioned the methadone program, planting the seeds and waiting for them to grow, even though Burroughs insisted that he wasn’t addicted, he was just chipping (shooting up occasionally).

Methadone was a synthetic morphine invented by the Germans during World War II, when their access to the Turkish opium fields was cut off. You could no more fight a war without morphine than without ammunition. So that in a sense the Third Reich rested on a solid methadone foundation, not to mention the fact that Goering and Goebbels were users. They called it Dolophine, after the Führer’s first name. In the sixties, doctors Vincent P. Dole and Marie Nyswander began treating addicts with methadone, and put together a program that was adopted by the federal government. They found that addicts could be weaned from heroin and morphine by being put on a maintenance dosage of methadone. Critics said all they were doing was replacing one form of addiction with another, which was true in a sense. But when addicts were offered a controlled, low-cost maintenance program, they were removed from the evils of the drug subculture. Under maintenance, they could go to their jobs and take care of their kids.

Jaffe kept lobbying for methadone, and at one point asked Burroughs to speak at a workshop at a Substance Abuse Conference at Grossinger’s. In New York State, there were half a million addicts, but only 35,000 were on methadone. In the sixties, Burroughs had once said that going from heroin to methadone was like switching from whiskey to port wine, but now, at the workshop, he said that methadone was a viable form of treatment.

In mid-September, Burroughs wrote Brion Gysin: “My habit is becoming a bit of a problem and I may go on a very exclusive and discreet maintenance program. Whatever the cost it has been worth it to stop drinking. Drink has been for me a real curse and what a relief it is not to wake up not remembering how I got home or what I said last night. Of course ideally I should be able to put down both junk and alcohol.”

The exclusive program that Ira Jaffe found for Burroughs was the methadone clinic operated by Dr. Harvey Karkus (what a name for a drug-abuse doctor, thought Burroughs) at 27 East Ninety-second Street. Dr. Karkus had an illustrious clientele that supposedly included a U.S. senator and a network anchorman. He catered to a whole stratum of attaché-case junkies. You could after all be an addict and a gentleman—De Quincey had contributed to Tory journals. The beauty of methadone maintenance was that it was cheap—twenty-eight dollars a week—and it wasn’t time-consuming, for all he had to do was go to the clinic for his weekly dose. Also, it gave you a nice buzz, you could feel it in the back of the neck and the thighs, and it lasted about six hours. The only side effect was that it cut down your sex drive, which to Burroughs didn’t matter that much anymore.

Thus came to an end the nearly two-year run of the “Bunker Follies,” a comedy-drama with a resident headliner on daily display, a supporting cast of street junkies, cameos by famous players brought around by stage manager Victor Bockris, a “shooting gallery” set, and an enticing aura of illegality. Burroughs settled down once again to a quieter life of writing and occasional readings, having had his last fling with Lady H.

In October, he went to Lawrence for a reading that James had arranged, and got a standing ovation when he spoke out against Jerry Falwell and his “Moron Majority.” He was taking every opportunity to castigate the born-agains. He found that he liked Lawrence, a small college town surrounded by hills and rivers almost exactly in the geographical center of the country. It was calm, it was quiet, it was cheap. You could live on $300 a month. He was staying in an apartment in a run-down, dead-end street by the railroad tracks, with weeds growing through cobblestones, and vacant lots, and houses that had an air of partial occupancy. There was no noise except train whistles. He adored the ghostly, deserted atmosphere, which prodded his imagination. He would write about the different species that inhabited these semivacant houses. Some were Odor Eaters, while others were Eye Eaters—that is, they ate images, a car accident for an appetizer, while excreting a slag heap of old photos. He would be quite content to settle down in Lawrence, he thought, and even looked at a house with oak floors and paneling, three bedrooms, and a big modern kitchen, on a third-of-an-acre lot with four big trees, for the reasonable price of $29,000.

“Yeah,” he wrote Brion Gysin, “that place in Kansas could be a nice spot for old age, feeding your goldfish in the evening in the garden pool, bats and fireflies.” Back in New York in November, he wondered what would happen now that Reagan and the Moron Majority were in. All ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves, in the words of Shakespeare. The snippy old black queen at the methadone clinic said, “We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

The new year, 1981, found him in the best shape he had been in for some time. He was off heroin, he had some money in the bank, and Cities of the Red Night was about to be published. He wrote Alan Ansen on January 28 that he was living in “one of the most congenial locations I have ever inhabited. I call it the Bunker because there are no windows and the walls are three feet thick, and three doors between me and the street with an armed guard downstairs during the day. . . . I keep fantastically busy. In addition to writing I make about twenty reading appearances a year with miscellaneous talks and lectures to piece out the odds. Things like that I wouldn’t do unless I needed the money, but I enjoy doing it and it is no doubt good for my character, like cooking.”

As the reviews of Cities started coming in, however, he was irked by what seemed to be the betrayal of a former friend and ally, Anthony Burgess, who, writing in the Saturday Review, said that “Burroughs’ cupboard of symbols is not well stocked and he becomes rather monotonous. . . . When we have pederastic thrusts on every page we soon begin to yawn. . . . Sexual strangulation is a recurrent, and soon boring, theme. . . . What Burroughs needs is a theology. Blake was a far greater fantasist and he demonstrated that no poet is big enough to create his own.”

“That bastard Anthony Burgess, who has become a fucking Catholic, gave me a terrible review,” he wrote Brion Gysin. “Maybe I’ll get to review his next book: ‘Mr. Burgess seems to be as inexhaustibly prolific as a warren of rabbits . . . but what has happened to the freshness and humor that made A Clockwork Orange such an exhilarating experience?”

To balance Burgess, there was an excellent review from another prominent English writer, J. G. Ballard, who called him “the first mythographer of the mid-twentieth century, and the lineal successor to James Joyce, to whom he bears more than a passing resemblance—exile, publication in Paris, undeserved notoriety as a pornographer, and an absolute dedication to The Word. . . . His novels are the first definitive portrait of the inner landscape of our mid-century, using its unique language and manipulative techniques, its own fantasies and nightmares.”

Cities of the Red Night was the first of a trilogy of novels written in straight narrative style, and linked by one central idea: The author, dissatisfied with the state of mankind, would rewrite history, inventing a society more to his liking. As Burroughs put it, “I parachute my characters behind enemy lines in time. Their mission is to correct retroactively certain fatal errors at crucial turning points in human history.” It was a brave attempt to write himself out of the human condition, which he felt was intolerable.

The spark for Cities was a thriller by James Jones, set on the island of Spetsai (which Burroughs had visited in 1973), called A Touch of Danger. Burroughs liked the detective story form, which was adaptable to any quest, and he thought up a “Private Asshole” called Clem Snide, who was on a missing-person case. Then Steven Lowe came along with his research on gay pirates, and this became another strand in the book. For there had been, in the seventeenth century, a Captain Mission who had established a short-lived libertarian colony on the island of Madagascar. This was just what Burroughs was looking for, in his yearning to recapture “the right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree.” So the adventure of a band of homosexual pirates (in their ship The Great White, a reference to Melville) became a parallel plot to the story of Clem Snide.

A third theme was that of the cities themselves, imaginary cities located in the Gobi Desert 100,000 years ago, the names of which were magic words that Brion Gysin had once taught him, saying, “If you want to get to the bottom of something, you should repeat these words before going to sleep.” The city of Waghdas is in the grip of a cholera epidemic, which turns out to be a virus that is sexual in origin, very much like the present AIDS epidemic, although Burroughs wrote the book before there was any talk of AIDS. In Tamaghis, a walled city of red adobe, there are nightly public hangings; Ba’dan, the oldest spaceport on planet earth, has been taken over by gunslingers; while the city of Yass-Waddah is a matriarchy run by a hereditary empress. The red night of the title is caused by a falling meteor, which lights up the sky and causes mutations in the inhabitants.

To indicate that he was now writing in a mainstream narrative tradition, Burroughs opened the book in the style of a Graham Greene novel. Farnsworth, the district health officer, is the typical Greene protagonist, the bad Catholic with a mission he doesn’t really believe in. He was “a man so grudging in what he asked of life that every win was a loss,” one of the rare instances of a psychological observation in a Burroughs novel, which are notable for their lack of character development. As Burroughs puts it, “They don’t develop, they are just there. They are mythological characters, fairy story characters.” So with a tip of the old fedora to Graham Greene, Burroughs appears to be signaling that he is at last writing a conventional novel, with characters and a plot.

But the Graham Greene opening is a trompe l’oeil, for soon the novel starts time-traveling, and we are back in 1702, with Noah Blake, the son of a Boston gunsmith, who has signed on with a pirate ship. This is one of the things that boys do in adventure books, they leave home and go to sea. It is as though Burroughs’ view of human freedom had been fixed at an early age, by reading books like Treasure Island and Two Years Before the Mast.

Along with time travel, there are various instances of cloning and identity switching. The young man that Clem Snide is looking for, for instance, is found decapitated, but his missing head later turns up on the body of another character.

The book switches back and forth between the pirate community in 1702 and the contemporary detective story. The pirates establish an outpost in Panama, where they fight the Spanish colonial power and govern themselves under a set of articles: No man may be imprisoned for debt. No man may enslave another. No man may be subjected to torture. No man may interfere with the sexual practices of another. No man may be put to death except for violation of the articles. Clem Snide, in the meantime, hot on the trail, discovers that the missing-person case is part of a diabolical conspiracy to wipe out the planet with a virus. We are living in dangerous times.

Eventually, characters from past and present mingle in the mythical cities, which are at war. There is not only time traveling but space traveling, to such an extent that some of the characters get star-tanned. The book ends with the destruction of the cities of the red night. The only survivor is Audrey Carsons, the author’s alter ego, who can write his way out.

The author’s point of view, as stated repeatedly by Burroughs, is that of the Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan I Sabbah: Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Every taboo that is broken, every act of outrage that is committed, is a justifiable act of insurrection against a bankrupt system of morality. Whatever his characters are doing, Burroughs seems to be saying, the actual conditions on the planet, created by the villains and morons in power, are worse.

Is it possible to write one’s way out? Can a book alter reality, or find the escape route? Burroughs ends on a melancholy note. All that he has been able to do is “blow a hole in time with a firecracker. Let others step through. Into what, bigger and better firecrackers? Better weapons lead to better and better weapons, until the earth is a grenade with the fuse burning.

“I remember a dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I reach out to touch the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare feeling of foreboding and desolation comes over me as a great mushroom-shaped cloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time. Like Spain, I am bound to the past.”

And yet, despite its gloomy conclusion, Cities of the Red Night is certainly the most compelling and inventive of Burroughs’ books since Naked Lunch. Reading it is not unlike playing a pinball machine, with the various characters being flicked hither and yon by the flippers, and bouncing off the brightly lit posts, and taking unexpected routes, and finally vanishing down the chute at the bottom on the machine, as on the glass screen above it the different settings light up in garish cartoon colors.

Dick Seaver, who published Cities for Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1981, thought it was a major book, and spent a lot of time on it with Burroughs and with James Grauerholz, who did a major editing job. Seaver liked working with Burroughs, who never pulled rank or showed off his erudition. He could have enlarged his audience tenfold had he been willing to make concessions. Middle America was not going to put up with all this homosexual stuff and the hanging scenes. And yet, Seaver was sure that one day a whole generation of academics were going to have a field day with his books. Already one critical study had been published, The Algebra of Need, by Eric Mottram, and Jennie Skerl, a professor at Skidmore, was working on another one. Cities sold 20,000 copies in hard cover, which was very good for Burroughs, and fellow publishers, who were not habitually generous with their praise, wrote to say “Congratulations on having brought Burroughs back to life.”

There had been a feeling in the publishing world that Burroughs was in hibernation, even though he kept producing books during his New York years; in fact, he produced so many that Mary McCarthy told Brion Gysin that he was “writing too much.” In the seventies, there was a scattering of short works published by small presses—Cobblestone Gardens (Cherry Valley, 1976), which was drawn in part from the first draft of Naked Lunch, and in which he addressed his feelings about his parents in the cut-up style; Ah Pook Is Here (Calder, 1979), a Mayan caper in which the evil Mr. Hart discovers the lost books of the Mayans in his search for immortality and murders his fellow explorer to keep the secrets to himself; Blade Runner: A Movie (Blue Wind, 1979), a science-fiction screenplay exploring the coming medical care crisis, which showed Burroughs at his most Archie Bunkerish: “It’s about plain middle-class middle-income Joe, the $15,000-a-year boy, sweating out two jobs, I.R.S. wringing the moonlit dollars out of him to keep the niggers and the spics on welfare and Medicare so they can keep their strength to mug his grandmother, rape his sister, and bugger his ten-year-old son”; The Book of Breeething (Blue Wind Press, 1980), a short text showing that there is no relation between a word and its meaning, and illustrated by Robert F. Gale.

Burroughs was asleep in the Bunker on March 3 when James received the call that Billy was dead. James waited until he was up and dressed and had taken his morning tea before breaking the news. It was not a surprise. Billy had been one of the walking dead for some time. Burroughs got up and went into his room and closed the door.

He hardly had time to grieve before leaving on a strenuous three-week publicity tour through Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Aside from book-signing events, he and John Giorno read in punk-rock clubs, where the audiences were small but enthusiastic.

That summer of 1981 Burroughs spent six weeks in Lawrence with James. He liked the town even more on his second visit, in contrast to the bustle and expense of New York, and began to think again of settling there. One day the temperature dropped ten degrees and the sky turned green-black like the sky in El Greco’s View of Toledo. It was a Kansas twister. He listened for tornado warnings, ready to head for the basement with a sledgehammer and a crowbar, as the radio advised in case you were trapped, but the tornado did not touch his neighborhood; it struck Gaslight Village, a trailer camp on the outskirts of town, and took out the Kmart at Thirty-first and Iowa. Hailstones the size of lemons fell on his porch.

In mid-August, he did a two-week teaching stint in Boulder, where he found His Holiness drinking on top of an ulcer. Then there was a two-week gig in Los Angeles and San Francisco with Laurie Anderson, whom Burroughs considered a remarkable performer, and who promised to become the only genuine pop star to have come out of the avant-garde.

When they got back to the Bunker in September there was a notice in their mailboxes that rents in the building would be doubled. Burroughs was paying $355, which would climb to $710. Giorno, according to his custom, which was to set problems aside for a time, put the letter away. But that afternoon, James came to tell him, “We’ve made a momentous decision. . . . William and I have had a long talk about the rent increase and we’ve decided it’s the will of the gods . . . and William is going to move out to Lawrence.”

Giorno thought it was a mistake to make such a snap decision. Burroughs should have asked himself, “What is threatening me?” and found a way to deal with it. Giorno went on a rent strike, and the increase was declared illegal, and the rents were frozen. So for Burroughs it was premature to say that he was leaving New York because it was too expensive when he could have stayed for the same rent. The truth was, Giorno thought, that James wanted Burroughs in Lawrence. In New York, James was a small fish in a big pond, and he was happier out of the city, and he wanted Burroughs out of the city, too. John felt bereft. It had been a joy to have Burroughs there, and it was a disappointment to lose him. But at the same time he realized that Burroughs, approaching old age, was carrying the idea of the expatriate to Kansas. He would make it his own, as he had done with Tangier, Paris, London, and so many other places. He was moving back to his native Midwest and the virtues of small-town life. After living out of a suitcase he wanted to own a house and land. He was two years away from seventy, and in your seventies you slowed down. The Bunker in the last two years had been the scene of endless amounts of heroin and cocaine, so that going to Kansas was the correct move. James was the nanny and Stew Meyer and Victor Bockris and James Prince were the tempters, and, as in any morality play, the nanny had won out over the tempters.

Before leaving for Lawrence, Burroughs had one final performance to attend to. He had fans among the Saturday Night Live writers, one of whom convinced producer Dick Ebersol to let him read on the program. But in dress rehearsal, Ebersol found Burroughs “boring and dreadful,” and ordered that his time slot be cut from six to three and a half minutes. The writers, however, conspired to let his performance stand as it was, and on November 7, he kicked off the show, sitting behind a desk, the lighting giving his face a sepulchral gauntness.

“The hospital lavatory has been locked for three hours solid,” he read. “I think they are using it as an operating room.

“Nurse: ‘I can’t find her pulse, doctor.’

“Dr. Benway: ‘Cardiac arrest.’ He looks around and picks up a toilet plunger, and advances on the patient. ‘Make an incision, Dr. Limpf,’ he says to his appalled assistant. ‘I’m going to massage the heart.’”

Among writers, Burroughs had positioned himself as the Great Outsider, but on the night of November 7 he had reached the position where the actress Lauren Hutton could introduce him to an audience of 100 million viewers as America’s greatest living writer.