22

THE FINAL YEARS

1988-1997

WHEN MY BOOK WAS published in 1988, Burroughs was in Chicago, where he was interviewed by a Tribune reporter who asked him what he thought of it. “It’s awful,” William said. This was not helpful, but when we spoke on the phone he was contrite. He hadn’t meant that the book was awful; he’d meant it was awful to be faced with your life on the page. There was a process of dislocation from sitting at home in Lawrence and telling stories to a friend, to seeing it all on the page, on hundreds of pages, undisguised by cut-ups and other literary devices. Even though he had been a willing guide, helping me locate key figures in the book that I could never have found otherwise, he was horrified to see it in print, where it would be read by thousands. And so we remained friends, and I went out to see him in Lawrence. He had a fellow staying with him whose profession was capturing exotic snakes, and one of them had gotten out of its cage. We searched the house room by room, but never found it. “I love lizards, I love turtles, I love snakes, but I draw the line at snakes on the loose,” William said.

Then there was the mandatory target practice with his shooting pal George Kaul, a retired ironworker, ruddy faced and heavy in the chest, who wore overalls and a peaked cap. “Our conversations are mostly limited to firearms,” William said. George was a year older, but said, “I call him the old man. He’s got a lot more miles on him.” We went out to a field where we hoisted paper targets and fired away, with the chiggers biting at our ankles.

William was writing daily entries in his diary. He was proud of his memory. “Look at the high school grads today,” he said. “Two-thirds of them have no idea of who our allies were in World War Two. They couldn’t find France and England on a map. God almighty, where are their heads?”

Grauerholz now had a house of his own, but came by every evening for dinner. He was running William Burroughs Communications from a former law office downtown, where he stored the rapidly growing Burroughs archives. He handled William’s mail and typed the edited drafts of his fiction output on his computer. It was William’s habit to take unused material from one book and use it in the next, so that each book became part of an ongoing narrative. When working on Western Lands, William’s last full-length novel, Grauerholz incorporated unused material from Place of Dead Roads. He had assimilated Burroughs’ voice and was able to stay on key in his revisions, acting almost as an alter ego.

Western Lands was published in 1984, when Burroughs was seventy, but far from emulating the old writer, who “couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of his words,” William in his final years was a whirlwind of activity. He had advanced from the category of vilified outcast, as in the legal battle over the obscenity of Naked Lunch, to counterculture celebrity, sought after for readings, gallery shows of his shotgun paintings, and cameo appearances in films and on Saturday Night Live. In addition, he was now a titled celebrity, Commandeur des Arts et Lettres in France and a member of the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He wore the rosettes in the lapel of his suits, saying, “They help you get through customs.”

Looking back on the years of dismissal followed by the years of fame, William quoted himself in The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: “So many good ones, and so many bad ones; that’s what you get for trying.”

He came often to New York, and I recall one visit in 1985 when he came to dinner with Allen Ginsberg. My son Gabriel was there, having been suspended from Bard College for various felonies such as not turning in papers. I told William and Allen that Gabriel had decided not to return to Bard for his senior year. At once, these two veterans of the counterculture and antagonists of their country’s institutions (one had graduated from Harvard and the other from Columbia) sat my son down and insisted that he must finish college, that his life would be ruined if he did not, that the only way to succeed in any career was to graduate, and that he would have a hard time raising a family if he didn’t. In spite of their pleas, Gabriel did not take their advice.

In writing a book whose principal actors were still alive with the exception of Kerouac, my life became entwined with theirs. I could never get Allen to sit down for an interview, not because he had qualms, but because he was as occupied and organized as the president of a firm, with meetings, readings, and travels. One day he told me he was flying out to Los Angeles to see his cousin, Dr. Oscar Janiger, a pioneer in psychedelic drug research, in particular LSD. He had introduced the Hollywood community, including Cary Grant, to mind-expanding experiences. I arranged to take the same flight as Allen, and I interviewed him for an uninterrupted five hours in midair. He was incapable of not being candid and articulate, and he had a prodigious memory. I had him to myself and that was worth its weight in gold. I had a car waiting at the airport to drive him to his cousin’s office in Santa Monica. He asked me to come inside to say hello, and as we went in, the actor James Coburn was leaving.

Allen gave me access to his archives, which he kept in a room in his walk-up loft. I went there often, and I often saw the same derelict sleeping on the floor in the open kitchen. It was Harry Smith, the folk music anthologist and experimental filmmaker, now a homeless drunk. Allen had paid his bill at the Chelsea Hotel and given him a housing allowance, which he spent on booze, turning up at Allen’s pad and passing out on the floor. Allen finally sent him to dry out with friends in Cooperstown. It was not an exaggeration to to say that Allen’s generosity was limitless. As he got older, more of his friends depended on him, and he was running his own private charity.

The only one of my characters I had trouble with was pint-sized Gregory Corso, who made it a point of honor to be difficult. He then lived in San Francisco with his wife and child, and I chased him all over the Mission District, from bar to bar. When I found him he agreed to accompany me to my motel, but only if we stopped at an Italian deli, where he ordered gorgonzola, salami, olives, bread, and two bottles of Chianti to loosen his tongue.

Back in New York a year later, I was continuing my Corso interviews. I got a call from my doorman: “There’s a gentleman coming up in the freight elevator.” It was Gregory, carrying a log that must have weighed fifty pounds, though he knew there was no working fireplace in my apartment. It was, I guess, his way of expressing how cumbersome our interviews were. After each of our sessions he would borrow one of my books, which I never saw again.

The climax of my relationship with Gregory came after my book was published in 1988. I went to a book party for a friend with my wife, Eileen, and my teenage daughter, Amber. Gregory was there, looking disheveled, and when we left, he followed us out and grabbed me by the lapels and started pummeling me. It seems that something in my book had displeased him. That’s the trouble with writing about people who are still alive; they come after you. When he went into his rant, “You fucking shit-hole son of a bitch bastard,” I moved him to the curb, because he was scaring my daughter.

In 1986, I went to Paris for a final interview with Brion Gysin. He died in July, and did not live to see his paintings hung in the Pompidou museum. A generation later came the retrospective at the New Museum on the Bowery, largely due to the efforts of John Giorno, his admirer and close friend. Giorno still lives on the Bowery, in the onetime YMCA converted into lofts. It was thanks to him that Burroughs moved there after returning to New York. Giorno was the link between the Beats and younger painters like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whom Burroughs met when Rauschenberg was working on the poster for Earth Day. Burroughs remarked, “They did not fully understand the technique and in a very short time nearly wrecked the planet.” Rauschenberg borrowed those words for his poster, which hung over William’s bed in Lawrence.

I was going there every other month to debrief Burroughs, who had gone on the methadone program. There was no methadone clinic in Lawrence, so I drove him to Kansas City to get his supply. At the clinic, fellow addicts waited to have him sign copies of Naked Lunch.

Our interview sessions took place at William’s round dining room table. I turned the tape recorder on, and William sat with his hands on his knees in a kind of trance and went into a stream of consciousness monologue. He worked himself up into such a state that a couple of times, at dramatic high points such as shooting his wife, he slipped off the chair and collapsed on the floor.

In 1986, Eileen and I visited William together. Burroughs then was in his lemur phase, amazed at those slender, big-eyed primates with long bushy tails, found mainly in Madagascar. Our friend Daphne Hellman, to whom we had introduced William in New York, was a fellow lemur lover. She had been to Madagascar and brought back pictures, which she gave us for William. When Eileen showed him the pictures he was won over, and said, “Wait just a minute.” He went into his bedroom and came out with a stack of nature magazines with articles about lemurs, and told Eileen, “They are kind to one another and they build their own families for life.” I thought that was an odd remark, coming from someone with a misanthropic view of mankind. But as he aged, William began to show a mellow side.

He told us, however, that he preferred lemurs to human beings, because they were so docile and gregarious. He was working on a book with an eighteenth-century hero, Captain Mission, who had a lemur as a pet. He read us a line: “The lemur snuggled closer and put a paw to his face.”

The book, Ghost of Chance, with lithographs by the painter George Condo, was published in 1991 by the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum in a limited edition of 160 copies priced at $1,800. Mass-market hardcover, and paperback editions were published in 1995, also illustrated.

Ghost of Chance saw a return of Captain Mission, who had first appeared in Cities of the Red Night, where he was killed by British musketeers. In Ghost of Chance he is reborn on the west coast of Madagascar, where he has established Libertaria, an ideal community of free spirits with no capital punishment, no imprisonment for debt, and no interference with religion or sexuality.

The ghost of the title is the Madagascar lemur, which Captain Mission protects against “the Board,” a sinister committee devoted to maintaining the superiority of human beings over animals. Captain Mission protects not only lemurs but all threatened species in the “Garden of Lost Biological Chances,” where “the last Tasmanian wolf limps through twilight, one leg shattered by a bullet.”

The vengeance of the persecuted animals comes about with the help of “the Museum of Lost Species,” host to such creatures as “the Hair,” one of whose victims “with a cry, rushes into the bathroom: his face is completely covered: great clusters of hair sprout from his ears, from the palms of his hands, from the bottoms of his feet. And the hair is alive, all writhing and twisting with separate life. The hairs have grown through his cheeks and palate into his mouth and throat.”

In addition, the terrible “Literalists” have put the word of Christ to malignant use. “Now Christ says to some son of a bitch take half your clothes, give him the other half. Accordingly Lits stalk the street looking for muggers and strip themselves mother naked at the sight of one. Many unfortunate muggers were crushed under the scrimmage pileups of half naked Lits.” Ghost of Chance gave Burroughs a chance to reprise some of his favorite fixations, with great gusto and a touch of tenderness toward lemurs.

When Burroughs came to New York in November 1987, we had him to dinner. He had become a magnet, gathering iron filings from all the arts, some of whom we invited, until we had a list of twenty. Eileen fixed a vat of seafood gumbo and ordered a couple of cases of wine and gallons of vodka. Late in the afternoon, Burroughs called asking if he could bring a Russian friend. A little annoyed at this last-minute addition, I asked, “What’s his name?” “Yevtushenko,” William said.

The author of Babi Yar turned out to be the life of the party, with his boyar-like aplomb. The regulars were there: Ginsberg, Giorno, the painter David Budd, and Grauerholz, who reminded Eileen of a monsignor in attendance to a bishop. Others were Alan Ansen—an old friend and poet, as wide as he was tall, who now lived in Greece—the poet Michael McClure, and the actor F. Murray Abraham. Ansen decided that everyone should recite a poem he was fond of. Yevtushenko jumped up and began trumpeting in Russian, and McClure followed with twenty lines of the prologue of The Canterbury Tales. It was a jolly evening, so jolly that I don’t remember most of it. But Eileen recalls a conversation with Allen about her insomnia. “You need a mantra,” he explained. He wrote one out for her, consisting of the complicated names of six lost cities in the Gobi desert. She still has it close to her bed.

At the time of our party, William was in New York for the vernissage of his debut show of shotgun paintings at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. In the catalog text, William wrote, “What emerges from these creations is the testament that everything is alive.” To critics who protested that Burroughs was invading the sacred territory of painting, Grauerholz replied that he was expressing in visual terms what he expressed in words. Even though he had come to painting late and without training, he was using techniques that he had developed in the cut-ups many years ago. Firing a shotgun at a canvas and splattering the paint was the same game of chance as cutting up newspapers and rearranging them.

As a respite from painting, William signed on in 1989 to write the libretto for a rock operetta by Robert Wilson, The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, to be staged in Hamburg, with songs by Tom Waits. It was based on Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, itself based on the Faust myth.

In Black Rider, Wilhelm, a clerk, enters a shooting match to win the heart of Katchen, whose father wants her to marry a famous hunter. The demonic ringmaster, Pegleg, introduces the show with the promise that “the blood will run like ribbons in your hair.” To be sure of winning, Wilhelm makes a deal with Pegleg, who gives him five magic bullets but keeps the sixth for himself. Wilhelm wins the shooting match, but Katchen’s father insists that one more bullet be fired. Wilhelm is forced to trade his soul to Pegleg for the last bullet, which flies into the heart of his bride-to-be, who falls down dead.

The connection with Burroughs’ own predicament was transparent. He often spoke of the night in Mexico City in 1952 as being “possessed” by an Ugly Spirit that had entered his soul. In a 1955 letter to Allen Ginsberg, he admitted that he had thought of writing about Joan’s death, but had not, “because I think I am afraid. Not exactly to discover unconscious intent. It’s more complex, more basic and horrible, as if the brain drew the bullet toward it. I was concentrating on aiming for the very top of the glass.”

Forty years later, in the libretto of Black Rider, he wrote: “Not all bullets fly straight and once they’ve flown it’s too late.” In the stage directions, he said: “Wilhelm aims and shoots. The bullet follows its own will. Katchen falls to the ground dead. . . . All but Wilhelm leave. He breaks down, losing his mind.”

Burroughs flew to Hamburg for rehearsals with his translator Udo Breger. Tom Waits was already there, haunting the waterfront bars and soaking up the atmosphere. Much of the pump organ music found its way to his keyboard. Waits liked to say, “It’s the piano that’s been drinking, not me.” His lyrics, sung in English while Burroughs’ text was spoken in German, wandered toward the gothic: “Lay down in the web of the black spider, I’ll drink your blood like wine.”

They were kept working in their hotel room by Wilson, who demanded endless revisions. At the opening on March 31, 1990, the applause was endless. Wilson kept yo-yoing on and off the stage at each ovation. Then the opera went on the road to Vienna in June and Paris in October. It was a triumph.

In 1990, I heard from Paul Theroux, who had liked my book: “Burroughs’ life is far more interesting than any of his work. He is like an alien mutant dressed up in an Arrow shirt and a suit and a trilby. . . . I should say that you’ll get your deathbed scene soon enough. He will die in two phases—first a massive stroke followed by paralysis; then a rapid decline, violent and gnomic last words, and he will at last leave the building.”

Theroux’s prognosis was prophetic. In 1991 Burroughs was seventy-seven, and the trip to Hamburg and exertion on the opera took their toll. In early May he collapsed and underwent a catherization to find the source of his problem. Grauerholz wrote to me on May 8 in an effort to minimize the damage: “He did not have a heart attack. He began feeling chest pains in early March, and with a cardiologist’s OK, he went to Toronto to visit Cronenberg on the Naked Lunch set. But the pains worsened, even with nitroglycerin tablets, and two days after he returned (March 28), his doctor sent him to the hospital in Lawrence, where the nonsurgical catherization revealed dangerous arterial blockage. He was transferred to a Topeka hospital and waited over the weekend for a nonsurgical balloon angioplasty, which was successful. He returned home on April 3, after one week’s hospitalization. Meanwhile, he is pretty much back to normal. It’s a good thing there wasn’t an actual heart attack, because that could have led to muscle damage; he was headed for one, though. The whole episode was very frightening for him and me and all of us here.”

Burroughs wrote to me on April 10: “I’m just out of the hospital after coronary bypass and a broken hip [no broken hip had been mentioned before] but am mending well enough, still very weak, but no chest pains . . . cross fingers.”

In May when Ginsberg came to visit, William was on a walker. He was, however, able to show Allen how he made his shotgun paintings, and they collaborated on a few. He explained that he used a 12-gauge shotgun; ordinary rifles made a single hole and the paint leaked out. William was now showered with requests for exhibitions, but reflected that Brion Gysin’s death had made possible his career as a painter. He would never have painted while Brion was still alive, not wanting to overshadow him, since the “Burroughs” name was far better known than the “Gysin” name.

At an exhibit of his work that Burroughs attended at the Earl McGrath Gallery in Los Angeles, in September 1991, a young woman in a miniskirt rushed up and pumped his hand, gushing, “I love your philosophy.”

Burroughs had evolved from outcast to idol. Once banned, he was now courted and feted as a writer and painter and cult figure. His first show in 1987 at the Shafrazi Gallery had sold out, and was followed by shows in England, Canada, Switzerland, and Italy—the prices going up with every show. He congratulated himself that he could knock off a painting in twenty minutes, while a book took a year or so.

The media had finally caught up with him. When he appeared in a cameo in the movie Drugstore Cowboy, the film critic Pauline Kael observed that he had become a “guest hipster.” In the same garb he turned up on Saturday Night Live, where he was introduced as “the greatest living writer in America.”

With the canonization of Burroughs came the commercialization of Burroughs, who appeared in Gap and Nike ads. Grauerholz cashed in on it, offering “Bullet Holes by Burroughs, T-shirts shot and signed by The Man. A very limited quantity will be available, which have been shot and signed by the author. Sizes L and XL cost $50. Regular shirts are $15 with no bullet holes or autographs.”

While Burroughs was courted by those in the know, Main Street kept its distance, as expressed in a Q & A column in the Kansas City Star of October 16, 1994. Danielle Palermo queried: “A recent Nike TV commercial features an old man in a suit and hat philosophizing on technology. My husband says the man is the author William Burroughs. Given the graphic nature of his work, I can’t imagine that Nike would use Burroughs as a spokesman. Would you settle our dispute?”

The answer man, Walter Scott, replied: “Your husband is right. Burroughs appears in Nike’s latest TV ad campaign, playing the part of a scientist. The choice of Burroughs by a company identified with health and fitness is strange indeed.”

While recuperating, William became engrossed in the 1947 sighting of aliens in Roswell, New Mexico. In their 1992 book, UFO Crash at Roswell, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt wrote that the bodies of three aliens had been discovered at the site, according to eyewitness Whitley Strieber. Burroughs arranged to visit Strieber and his wife in their New Mexico cabin. The aliens did not choose to manifest themselves while he was there, but Strieber said they might contact him at a later date.

The fiasco with the aliens reminded me of the time in the seventies when William was taking a seminar in out-of-body experiences—the idea was that you could train yourself to leave your body and fly around to various destinations. I told him that I would be in the Hamptons that weekend, gave him the address, and proposed that he contact me there. On Monday, he told me, “I flew over the street, but I must have taken the wrong number down.”

Back from New Mexico and still feeling the fatigue of his operation, Burroughs dwelled on the duality within himself. He had long been convinced that he was possessed by an evil spirit, which he described to a visitor, the well-connected Victor Bockris, who in the days of the Bunker acted as a scout, providing celebrities daily, such as the Rolling Stones.

Burroughs told Bockris: “When I go into my psyche, at a certain point I meet a very hostile, very strong force. It’s as definite as someone attacking me in a bar. We usually come to a standoff. . . . Invasion is the basis for fear. There’s no fear like invasion. . . . I’ll tell you one thing, you detach yourself and allow this to wash through you instead of trying to oppose it. . . . You can’t oppose something intellectually that is overpowering you emotionally.”

The evil spirit could be defined as a fear of death. In order to overcome it, this confirmed mocker of religion was able to make himself believe in God and Jesus Christ, which helped him heal the soul he now possessed. He was reading M. Scott Peck’s Denial of the Soul, and agreed with the author that the soul was essential, and that the experience of dying, when the soul leaves the body, was a great spiritual adventure. He was refuting the conviction of a lifetime, going back to his childhood, when his dad had told him, “There was a little dog, and his name was Rover, and when he was dead, he was dead all over.”

As for Jesus, William now said, “There’s a spate of scholars who say that Jesus Christ never existed, but I think this is completely erroneous. Just as with Shakespeare, one person is writing, with Jesus, one person is speaking.” The miracles bothered William, though, not because Jesus was incapable of curing the sick but because it was a mistake to upset the natural order of things. He’d seen too many phony healers, motivated by reprehensible self-glorification. And of course with Jesus, the Church had a monopoly on miracles.

Still he was open to attempting healing through religious ceremonies. In an effort to banish the evil spirit, William enlisted the services of a Navajo shaman, Melvin Betsellie, who lived in the the Lawrence area. Ginsberg happened to be visiting during the week in March 1992 when the sweat lodge ceremony was conducted. Outside Lawrence, the big-bellied shaman dug a pit covered by a tent. Heated stones were placed in the center of the pit. Inside the tent, Allen sat naked, William was in shorts, and other friends were present.

The shaman threw water on the heated rocks, and clouds of steam filled the tent. William and Allen choked on the hot steam and had trouble breathing, but felt better when the shaman threw coals into the pit. Then the shaman pulled hot coals out of the pit with his bare hands. He put some coals in his mouth, seemed to swallow them, then spat them out. The shaman touched William with a hot coal, but William felt no pain. The shaman prayed some more, to dismiss the bad spirits. Finally, overcome by the steam and the heat, William pleaded, “Open the door, some air.” The shaman opened the door and asked those present to help the old man with the strong heart and clear head. Now that the bad spirit had been removed, he could live a peaceful life.

William told Allen that the ceremony had impressed him deeply. The shaman had described the evil spirit to him as a winged and eyeless white skull, and William assumed that it must have been an acquisitive tycoon, perhaps thinking of his own adding-machine forebears. The shaman confided that this was the worst case he’d ever handled, and that the tenacity of the evil spirit had almost overpowered him.

The ceremony reinforced William’s newly found sense of the sacred. Allen was also impressed and his mind went back over his long friendship with Bill, his adventurous spirit and stubborn iconoclasm, how he’d stuck by his writing in the face of hardship and derision, and how his work by now had been read by millions.

In 1994, the year Burroughs turned eighty, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London staged a week-long tribute: “A Present for William Burroughs.” Among the speakers was a Welsh scholar, Peter Swales, who had devoted himself to debunking the accepted version of Sigmund Freud’s life and work. His connection to Burroughs was that in the course of his research he was given access to the papers of Paul Federn, a psychiatrist at the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York. It was Federn who had treated Burroughs in 1940 when he was confined there for a month after slicing off a piece of his little finger.

Mortally ill in 1950, Federn shot himself in the head. Swales found in his archives two dozen case histories using assumed names, and figured out the one that was Burroughs.

Federn wrote that during hypno- and narcoanalysis, Burroughs had episodes in which he would become a Chinese peasant on the Yangtse, or a redneck farmer in Texas, or a Hungarian dowager duchess. He called these episodes his “routines,” a concept he retained for his writing.

In his talk at the Institute entitled “Burroughs in the Bewilderness,” Swales said he had contacted Burroughs and was invited to Lawrence to see him. “Burroughs is now at an age where he has outgrown shame,” Swales said. “He has no regrets about the past.” The period when he was at Payne Whitney Burroughs now called “my dark ages.” When he had bought a pair of poultry shears and cut off the top joint of his left little finger, Swales said, Burroughs presented the severed segment to his analyst, Dr. Herbert Wiggers, who panicked and had Burroughs committed to Payne Whitney, where he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Burroughs told Swales, “Analysis was not the answer. I went through about six analysts. I wore them out.”

After bringing out a book of letters in 1993, in 1995 Viking published the last volume in a seven-book contract, My Education, a collection of Burroughs’ dreams and random thoughts. The title came from a dream where Burroughs is trying to get on a plane, but a woman at the ticket counter “with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat” refuses to let him board, informing him, “You haven’t had your education yet.”

Many of the dreams in the 193-page book consist of Burroughs talking to his cats, or trying to get sex, along with some flying dreams, suitcase-packing dreams, and dreams of being bullied by men in uniform. There were conversations with Gysin and Ginsberg.

“Gysin was the only man I have ever respected,” Burroughs wrote. He had made available a method that allowed Burroughs to escape convention in his writing. Brion took on “a 99-year lease in the collective unconscious and sent us back a series of datelined, bylined reports.”

Shocking passages were scarce, reflecting a more placid Burroughs in his eighties, unhurriedly observing a beach of coarse gray gravel or a cloud of fire. But the pessimism remained: “What a horrible loutish planet this is. The dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. Hopeless rubbish.”

The novelist and critic Will Self, a Burroughs admirer, wrote a review in the Guardian: “Why would anyone become sufficiently unhinged to imagine that his dream jottings were palatable for the public? What maundering egotism could give rise to a conviction of the importance of such minutiae? . . . Dreams are as commonplace and boring as the average dreamer.”

However, Will Self went on, what Burroughs had in mind was “an assault on one reading of the Freudian project.” By describing his dreams, he “short-circuited the possibility of interpretation by anyone else.” This was essentially what Peter Swales had said in London. Burroughs was his own analyst, able to explain his own dreams. As Will Self put it, “Burroughs is a writer who has given his psyche to literature to be used as a strange test bed. . . . Looked at it this way, his odd politics, enthusiasm for firearms, militant homosexuality and cranky misogyny are a sinisterly accurate reflection of our own current obsessions. . . . Burroughs has the courage of his own perversions . . . [which] makes him capable of still churning out more inspired apercus, apothegms, riffs and tropes in any ten pages than most writers manage in an entire volume.” One example: “I see a centipede about three feet long come into the room. It rubs against the door-jamb like a cat and makes an indescribable sound of ingratiation.”

One passage in My Education showed that Burroughs was still smarting at having his life depicted in my biography. “Ted Morgan’s biography starts with a basic misconception,” he wrote. “Literary Outlaw. To be an outlaw you must first have a base to reject and get out of. I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment, or hotel room.”

Such were the fanciful ramblings of an octogenarian. Artists have always been cast as outlaws. As Oscar Wilde, who like Burroughs went to jail, put it, “There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture.” Burroughs was legally an outlaw, after being deprived of his rights and imprisoned by a Mexican court for killing his wife.

In 1996, an important exhibit called Ports of Entry, showing Burroughs’ art and collages, opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It included his shotgun paintings as well as seventy collages made with Brion Gysin. At the opening, there was some grumbling among art historians that Burroughs, whose fame came from writing, should be granted such a prominent exhibition in one of Los Angeles’s major museums.

In November, the exhibit traveled to the Spencer Museum of Art on the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence. An article in the Kansas City Star began with the sentence, “William Burroughs is no longer shocking,” and noted “his ubiquitous presence in the popular culture.” The newspaper’s art critic, Alice Thorn, wrote that the work with Gysin “sometimes approaches genius.”

At a symposium at the opening on November 2, various speakers extolled Burroughs. The writer and musician Richard Hell said of his writing, “It’s like you can hear the wind whistling through his ribs.”

Allen Ginsberg was there and said the work was “like the Zen finger pointing at the moon.” He spoke of William’s quest to escape the confines of the ego. Then a hunched figure wearing a fedora and walking with a cane appeared on the stage. He sat down and answered questions, moving his cane nervously back and forth like a pendulum.

“What do you think of the Internet?”

“It’s a step in the right direction.”

“Why did you pick Lawrence as a place to live?”

“Lawrence won by default.”

“Why are you a member of the National Rifle Association?”

“I’m a member but I haven’t paid my dues. I just don’t care about the negatives. If we shoot each other, too bad. What can I do about it?”

“Who are your favorite authors?”

“Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Graham Greene.”

“What phrase do you like of Shakespeare’s?”

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. . . . A tale told by an idiot.”

Later, Burroughs told a reporter from The New York Times: “I’m very comfortable being the object of admiration. That’s what’s wrong with Salinger. He runs like a rabbit.”

The book editor of the Kansas City Star, George Gurley, wrote that Burroughs was “like no other American writer since Mark Twain.” He might have added, “Missouri born.”

Burroughs had moved from the margin of society into the mainstream. The sinister, drug-addicted, homosexual pariah who had shot his wife was shown in one of the exhibit’s photographs with the basketball player Charles Barkley, though I doubt he’d ever watched a game.

Allen Ginsberg had attended the symposium in spite of his chronic bronchitis and diabetes. He also kept up a punishing schedule of readings. When he came home he could hardly climb the stairs of his fourth-floor walk-up, and had to catch his breath on every landing. In 1994, however, a bonanza had come his way, allowing him to move into an elevator building. Columbia had long held his huge archive, but obtusely passed on buying it, and it went to Stanford for a cool million. Stanford weathered the hate mail from old grads for having bought the papers of a “known pedophile” and “a dirty-mouthed Beatnik.” For Allen, it was a “you can’t win” situation (except for the money), for when he spoke at New York’s Town Hall in June 1995, protestors harangued him for the Gap ad and for selling out to Stanford.

Short of breath, he was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism, but could no more be stopped from reading than Yehudi Menuhin from fiddling. In October he flew to London to read at Royal Albert Hall and was joined on the stage by Paul McCartney. Like William, Allen had attained, in the last years of his life, the fame of a rock star. Once they had been hounded as miscreants, and now there were college classes in Beat writing.

Even when told, in 1996, that his heart was failing Allen was incapable of refusing invitations to read, and hopscotched to Prague, Rome, and Paris, where he was welcomed by President Jacques Chirac. Back from his travels, Allen did his usual summer teaching gig at Naropa University in Boulder, and stopped in Lawrence in November to see Burroughs.

In New York, Allen moved into his new apartment, but his health did not improve. Hospitalized in March 1997, he called Burroughs and said, “The doctors are taking tests. They’re trying to decide whether it’s hepatitis or jaundice. They have a passion for tests.” William thought his voice sounded weak. Then the doctors found cancer nodules in his liver and gave him two to five months to live. He called Burroughs and said, “I think much less.” He had inoperable liver cancer. Allen said he thought he’d be terrified, but instead he was exhilarated. Discharged from the hospital on April 2, he went home and spent the day on the phone saying good-bye to everyone in his address book. The next day he suffered a massive stroke, and died on April 5, at the age of seventy-one. The New York Times carried a front-page obituary, better coverage than he had ever gotten when he was alive.

Allen’s death was a blow to William at a time when his own health was failing. He thought about Allen’s generosity, of all the money he’d given away to young writers and artists. Allen liked to introduce people to one another, as opposed to what William called “the anti-pimps,” who don’t want people to get together.

Burroughs at eighty-three was slowing down. On a typical day, he woke up early and took his methadone, then back to bed until breakfast at nine thirty: lemonade and tea, toast and an egg. Then he fed the cats and read, mostly pulp fiction and gun magazines. In the afternoon, cocktail hour was three thirty, vodka and Coke and a joint or two, then diary writing until friends came around six. Bedtime at nine. William was smoking pot again, saying it was the only thing that cured the nausea that came with chills.

Amid the old-geezer grumbling and the rambling of a mind going soft, he maintained his anarchist spirit and looked for newspaper stories that reinforced his lack of confidence in the government, like the one about the sixty-nine-year-old retired minister in Boston. The cops kicked his door down, threw him to the floor, and cuffed his hands behind his back. He died of a heart attack, and of course they had the wrong address, and had to pay a big chunk of cash to his widow.

Then there was the Ruby Ridge case. The Feds came after this guy for sawing two inches off his shotgun, which called for, at most, a small fine. The Feds shot his son’s dog and shot the baby in his wife’s arms. Then they shot the wife. Sure he was a pain in the ass and a white supremacist, but the Feds were completely out of line. This was a full-scale fascist government in operation.

On August 2, 1997, just four months after Allen’s death, William’s heart gave out and he died at home, at the age of eighty-three. He had told me years before that he did not want to be buried in the Burroughs plot in St. Louis with the family he scorned. He did not want to be buried at all, since burial implied a belief in the afterlife. He wanted to be cremated in Tangier and have his ashes dropped in the Strait of Gibraltar from the Moroccan coast at Cape Spartel.

At the time of his death, however, Burroughs had embraced some form of religion, and James Grauerholz orchestrated an elaborate memorial and burial. On August 6, at Liberty Hall, a spacious old theater in downtown Lawrence, William lay in an open casket, wearing a velvet vest to which were pinned his rosettes from the American and French Academies. More than a hundred attended, ranging from close friends to those who barely knew the departed.

Among the friends was James McCrary, a published poet who did various chores for Burroughs, such as cooking and typing. He thought of Allen’s last visit when they had gone target shooting in the fields, with the mingling smells of gunpowder, vodka, and cow shit. And Allen preparing turnip stew, while William fed the cats. “Come here, Calico Jane, you little bitch.” Then tasting the stew. “My God, this will not do.” And sending McCrary out for lamb chops. McCrary was in the line that passed by the coffin, on the top of which William’s hat and sword cane had been placed. He recalled William telling him that it was an old East Indian police cane, used to quell riots. “I have to be prepared,” he said. “Look what happened to Lennon.”

Anne Waldman, also on line, thought the undertaker had done a fine job. William looked luminous, peaceful, his forehead somehow lifting toward the future, if such a thing was possible. The tawny-colored Moroccan vest was a gift from Brion Gysin. She remembered reading Naked Lunch when she was fifteen. In Boulder, William had been teaching at the Naropa poetry program, which she ran, and it was amazing how prophetic he was. He was the sort of person who could meditate in front of a rock and make it explode. Anne recalled her first shooting lesson, lining up the cans in the Colorado hills and blasting away with a .22.

George Laughead, the professor at the University of Kansas who had introduced a freshman named Grauerholz to Burroughs’ writing more than twenty years ago, was also on the line. He thought back to one of the last times he had seen William, on March 26. They were drinking vodka and Coke, and William asked George to roll a joint for him. “I’m old—my thumbs don’t work.” William was stoned and reading aloud from Mario Puzo’s The Last Don: “He wanted blood. He cut the guy to pieces. He cut off his cock and nuts and breasts.”

“That’s power,” William said. He kept filling his drink. He was in a despondent mood, having just learned that Allen Ginsberg was dying.

William suddenly stood up and shouted: “SHOOT THE BITCH AND WRITE A BOOK! THAT’S WHAT I DID!”

“Did he just say what I think?” George had asked.

“It’s so out of character,” Grauerholz said.

Not out of character to readers of William Burroughs, George had thought. Not out of character to Joan Vollmer Burroughs.

George had gone over again on the Fourth of July for dinner and fireworks. They passed the pipe and drank some brandy George had brought, though William stuck to vodka and Coke. It was his last month on earth, George now reflected. He thought back to the day when William had said “Shoot the bitch and write a book.” Would being a murderer keep Burroughs out of the canon of literature? Grauerholz was working hard to move him into the respectable column, reformed and cleaned up, but you don’t get into the Western canon if you murdered your wife.

After the fireworks in the backyard, William had walked George to the front door. He stood on the porch as George got into his van. George honked his horn and looked into the rearview mirror. He saw a hunched-over old man, waving.

Grauerholz’s mother, Selda, sang “For All the Saints Who from Their Labors Rest.” Tim Miller of the University of Kansas religious studies department delivered an invocation, asking those present to “pick up the torch” to maintain our basic human freedoms of lifestyle and self-expression. A gun and a joint were placed in the coffin, adding at least one illegal ingredient to the menu of pious invocations and hymns.

Grauerholz, who had been legally adopted by Burroughs, inherited the copyrights to all his works and would spend the rest of his life handling Burroughs’ estate. He was now the head of a corporation, William Burroughs Communications. He thought back to his arrival in New York with his guitars in 1974. He had hoped to join a band, but instead became Burroughs’ assistant. In the mid-’80s he had seen William go through a period of deep sadness and depression as he reviewed his long catalog of mistakes.

This resulted in William’s final ten years being suffused with patience and kindness, though he never lost his salty side. He could blow up, but became far more patient and considerate. He knew he was heading for the Land of the Dead. People ask me, “What was life with Burroughs like?” And I say, “Compared to what? What other life did I have?”

The next morning, a white hearse led the motorcade and drove the forty miles from Lawrence to the Bellefontaine cemetery in St. Louis, where Burroughs was buried in the family plot presided over by William Seward Burroughs, stony-faced in a monument erected to “his genius.” Among the mourners, Patti Smith sang “Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be,” and Anne Waldman read the last lines from Western Lands: “The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words.” Then men in hard hats lowered the casket in its metal outer casing into the Missouri earth.

I prefer to remember Burroughs the brilliant anarchist, Burroughs the witty skeptic, Burroughs the fierce pessimist. His entire body of work was a sustained attack on the values of mainstream society and on all forms of control, from government to God. So instead of singing hymns and mouthing sermons, I would like to close with excerpts from William’s last notes in 1997, when he was still struggling with his demons:

May 12: “Where did we go wrong? I figure the wrongness was always there. I feel the chill and grow old. So many terrible scenes . . . deactivate it, let it go.”

May 24: “So we start with the big, ugly American lie. Allen Ginsberg gnawed a hole in the lie, his was the Howl heard round the world.”

May 26: “All governments are built on lies. Who are these anti-drug freaks? . . . I have gotten so many excellent images from cannabis.”

May 31: “That vile salamander Gingrich, Squeaker of the House, is slobbering about a drug-free America by the year 2001. How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity. Imagine the barren banality of a drug-free America.”

June 6: “It just does not come anymore. I guess I feel—why go on.”

Burroughs was in the category of artist-revolutionaries, unchangeable in their alienation, waiting for the world to come to them, who became icons late in life. His admirer J. G. Ballard lamented his passing and said: “He was the most important and original writer since the Second World War. Now we are left with career novelists.”

Burroughs was dead, but books by him kept coming, thanks to the entrepreneurial assiduousness of the director of William Burroughs Communications. Grove brought out Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, in 2001. These were handwritten diary entries dating between November 16, 1996, and July 20, 1997, days before Burroughs’ death.

This bouillabaisse of recollections, written in short sentences and jumping from one idea to the next like cut-ups, mixed banalities with personal observations. “Last night, vague dreams I was somewhere, couldn’t stay long. I packed laundry bag with drawstring.” Then, haunted by the death of Ginsberg, he wrote: “I have an intense vivid feeling of Allen’s presence. Outside in the leaves. I see him clear. . . . Are you conscious, Allen?”

Amid recurring themes, the love of his cats. A vet had discovered a BB-gun pellet in one of them, and Burroughs repeatedly muttered that he’d like to blackjack whoever put it there. He expressed his admiration for Mario Puzo’s The Last Don. “A hitman has to be cool. It’s just a job.”

There were numerous repetitions, a sign of senility which Burroughs acknowledged: “And why should old men not go mad?” He was a witness to his own dissolution: “But what does an evil old recluse do? Just sit and be evil?” He was living out the legend of the ornery cuss raging against the drug wars, and every so often there came an image worthy of the early Burroughs: “Ultimate horror story: The centipede prick.” As for his place in literature: “I am a Tech sergeant in the Shakespeare Squadron.”

Grauerholz had become a prominent citizen of Lawrence, known not only for his business acumen and work ethic but also for his parties, to which he sometimes invited people he’d just met. Sometimes those parties got pretty wild. In November 2005, during an impromptu gathering in his backyard, a group of young skateboarders showed up. A member of the group, whose name was never revealed, beat Grauerholz unconscious. Witnesses told police that his assailant had referred to him as “a fucking faggot.” Grauerholz suffered brain trauma, broken facial bones, and facial nerve damage. His assailant told police that Grauerholz had sexually assaulted him.

Grauerholz later told a blogger who interviewed him that he was suffering from retrograde amnesia and remembered only that his attacker had appeared out of the shadows. Friends later told him that the guy kept hitting him and shrieking vile curses that he was a faggot. “He said that I was sexually assaulting him. He was very drunk and I had been drinking. It’s not inconceivable that I might have verbally propositioned him. It was broken up, and I was led away staggering, and this son of a bitch grabs the glasses off my face, crushes them, and then punches me again, knocking me to my knees. I was taken to Kansas University Medical for surgery, because I had facial bone fractures [around] my eye socket. The bills were fifty thousand dollars, but my insurance covered all but ten or twelve. They let the kid go. Evidently they believed the kid was the victim.”

Grauerholz felt that the police reaction was, “What does the old queer expect if he makes a pass at a kid?” He also felt that his reputation in Lawrence was tarnished. “It’s like they used to say: ‘A kike is the Jewish gentleman who just left the room.’ Well, a queer is the gay man who just left the room.”

Grauerholz recovered, however, and in 2008 Grove Press brought out a book written by Burroughs and Kerouac more than sixty years before, but never published. This was And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, based on the 1944 killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, who stabbed him and threw his body in the Hudson. Carr turned himself in and served two years for manslaughter. Burroughs dismissed the book as “not a distinguished work” and did not want it published. An agreement had also been made with Carr, who went on to a career with United Press, not to publish it while he was alive. Grauerholz respected that agreement, but when Carr died in 2005, he went ahead, and wrote an afterword saying the book was an example of the latent talent of the two authors.

In 2009, twelve years after Burroughs’ death, the fiftieth anniversary edition of Naked Lunch was published by Grove in hardcover with the restored text and the jacket design by Brion Gysin that had appeared in the 1959 Olympia Press printing in Paris. When published in America by Grove Press in 1962, the book was declared obscene at a trial in Boston. But that verdict was overruled by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which said that the book had “redeeming social value.” In the intervening years, the book had gained the aura of a classic. Time magazine put Naked Lunch on its list of one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

The new edition included previously excised passages, an afterword, and an interview with Burroughs, in which he expressed his interest in aliens and UFOs. “Every race and condition,” he said, “no matter how vile and horrible, must merge into new forms . . . in the light of the facts of ESP and alien life. This understanding that we are not alone will knock down our wall of misunderstanding.”

Reviewers said that the autoerotic hangings in the text still jolted, though they walked the line between cries of conscience and fetishistic pleasure. Distinctions were made between Ginsberg, whose Beat sensibility was centered on Whitmanesque brotherly love, and the misanthropic Burroughs. The underlying theme of addiction, which Burroughs called “the algebra of need,” was seen as a metaphor for a number of destructive obsessions. Burroughs was praised for tackling topics that were still highly relevant, given the continued obsession with drugs and sex in our entertainment-soaked world. Some reviews suggested that Naked Lunch was a modern Pilgrim’s Progress, looking fearlessly into heroin addiction and sexual deviance. Burroughs was said to have created a new mythology in which comedy is indistinguishable from fury. Others said the book was easier to read in the Internet age, when we were accustomed to clashing images and ideas. Generally, reviewers saw the anniversary edition as proof of the book’s influence. At first dismissed as a crackpot who wrote illegible nonsense, Burroughs was now seen as a prophet of American life in our time. As one reviewer put it: “Burroughs shoved America head first into the bilge of its hypocrisy, its blood-soaked history, and the Pepsodent-smiling brainlessness of its consumer culture.”