Death smells.
I mean, death has a special smell, over and above the smell of cyanide,
cordite, blood, carrion or burnt flesh.
It's a grey smell, it stops the heart and cuts off the breath
smell of the empty body, smell of field hospitals and gangrene.
Now folks, if you'll just step this way,
you are about to witness the complete, All-American, de-anxietized man.
(Narrator) William Seward Burroughs,
heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company
founded by his grandfather,
was born in 1914 in Saint Louis, Missouri.
After graduating from Harvard University
and traveling Europe, he moved to New York City,
where he met his future wife, Joan Vollmer,
and fell in company with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Experimenting with new forms of literature, as well as drugs,
the three friends formed the vanguard of a cultural phenomenon
that would come to be known as the "Beat Generation".
Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986.
Thanks for the wild turkey and passenger pigeons,
destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians, to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin,
leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American Dream, to vulgarize and falsify
until the bare lies shine through.
In the 50s, anything opened up a good avenue to thinking.
Because it was people talk about the 50s,
they see Happy Days and they think it was fun.
It was horrible in the 50s, it was the most terrible time!
It's the first memory I had, and it was of
you had to be exactly like everybody else.
The Beat Generation was crushing,
there was an attempt to bust out of that, man.
All of this was a big rap on the knuckles of mainstream,
white, staid, pool-in-the-backyard America.
(Burroughs) Kid, what are you doing over there
with the niggers and the apes?
Why don't you straighten out and act like a white man?
After all, they're only human cattle.
You know that yourself.
I hate to see a bright young man fuck up
and get off on the wrong track.
So, what was the Beat Movement?
It was real...
Well of course it was it underwent many changes.
In the 60s it became quite political.
But as I've always said it,
it's more a sociological, than a literary phenomenon.
It was a sociological movement of worldwide importance
unprecedented worldwide importance.
A cultural revolution.
So, I would characterize it as a spiritual liberation movement,
actually, like women's lib, black lib, spirit lib, or spiritual lib,
that began in the 40s, first took shape as a literary movement,
with the production of a number of notable utterances.
Allen Ginsberg's first publication was "Howl",
published in 1956.
In 1957 Jack Kerouac's "On the Road",
and in 1959 "Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs
these three books came out.
Beatniks were big.
Overnight it was huge it was like a hula-hoop.
Much to their embarrassment, I think.
Because it started out pretty much in North Beach
and stuff-like, poets.
So once it became so big in the media
they were embarrassed by that term.
All of those poets,
they couldn't fit the stereotype of what Beat was.
That was a media hype to sell papers.
And they pimped that boy, they pimped that bad boy really.
Burroughs himself never identified with the Beat Generation.
He was a godfather and mentor.
He was a bit older, and since he was also Harvard-educated,
he just brought in a whole bunch of ideas,
just from the classical education he had.
And invented a style of book, almost.
It was so original.
And anything that's so original like that eventually lasts.
I think probably Freud would think him to be
deeply, deeply troubled
profoundly mentally ill.
Everybody was enamored by William
because he was famous before anybody else,
and he was also famous for all the wrong things.
He was the first person that was famous for things
you were supposed to hide.
He was gay, he was a junkie, he didn't look handsome
he shot his wife, he wrote poetry about ass holes and heroin.
He was not easy to like.
Class was an essential factor in the work and life.
William came from a very traditional, upper-crust American family.
Though the fortune may have been lost,
the breeding was deep and instilled.
And thus, the gentleman we know was bred.
I could totally relate to the dry thing,
that salesman thing that he created.
This very underplayed thing just very, very removed.
Very removed.
Also very, very interested in death.
And I think that's what scared Americans
more than his writing itself.
If he had that worldview, and he was writing in a more polite way
and it didn't have to do with guns and junk...
Usually, the most radical work tends to come
from the upper classes.
Because they're trying so hard to shock,
so hard to get away from their roots.
So he's a fascinating character uniquely American in that regard.
I don't think that work could have existed had he not been breaking away
from an incredibly patrician, midwestern background.
There was no rebellion in those days.
Certainly not in our strata.
Or very little that I saw, anyway maybe isolated cases.
But by and large, they were in a good spot,
their families were in a good spot,
and the sons wanted to just go along with that in the same way.
Thanks for the KKK,
for nigger-killing lawmen feeding their notches.
For decent, church-going women, with their mean,
pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for Kill-a-Queer-for-Christ stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for prohibition, and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed
to mind his own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories
all right, let's see your arms.
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal
of the last and greatest of human dreams.
Burroughs achieved a great deal more
than being arguably the greatest writer in the world
in the second half of the 20th century.
Because he did break down so many barriers,
and he did play into and influence so many other fields.
Like rock and roll, like the movies.
Well, William seemed to have a connection
with anything and everything.
You see a movie like "Blade Runner",
and then you find the phrase "blade runner" came from him.
The term "heavy metal" is attributed to him.
"Soft Machine" there are so many phrases,
names of groups that come from William's work.
He's like another kind of Bible.
He's a great pioneer of the Gay Liberation movement
of the whole position or standing of gay people around the world.
Where did you learn about sex originally?
From friends?
Books.
There was a book called "The Plastic Age"
by Percy Marks, sort of a daring book of the 1920s.
"The Green Hat," and "Coming of Age in Samoa"
this is the 20s I'm talking about.
It was a very different era.
Burroughs once said to me if one man stands up,
and rejects the bull shit of society,
it makes it possible for everyone else to follow on.
And he was that man, to some extent.
And here's Reverend Blaswell in the "Denver Post":
"Homosexuality is an abomination unto God and should never be
recognized as a legal human right any more than robbery or murder.”
At the present time in Colorado, where this was written,
approximate mob conditions prevail.
And by "MOB" I mean "My Own Business."
No sex crimes on the books,
you can fuck a cow right in front of the sheriff,
and all he can say is "Moo".
But you can hardly expect to bring down the barn with an act like that.
With the right virus offset,
perhaps we can get this whole show out of the barnyard and into space.
This is the space age and we are here to go.
They asked him at a press conference
what he thought of the gay rights movement.
And his response was, "I have never been gay a day in my life.
And I'm sure as hell not part of any movement."
But Burroughs was a deconstructor of labels.
That was just another sort of amalgalmized effort
to not be marginalized.
And he was one of the very few maybe Jean Genet,
maybe Pier Paolo Pasolini who had the balls,
way before it was vogue,
and certainly when it was dangerous, to say, "I'm queer."
But he was way beyond that, because he didn't respect
any of the rules of the gay world at all either.
He was hardly a Boys-in-the-Band
he would've hated that.
That culture would have been very foreign to him
because there were SO many rules.
There were so many rules in the straight world too.
And he violated the rules of even junkie's worlds.
He opened up to me not gay culture, but gay rebels,
who couldn't fit in with gay culture,
who were very different.
I have to say that Burroughs to this day, in his work,
have an uneasy relationship with queer culture in America,
or queer writing or whatever.
Burroughs was never seen as part of that,
he was still too transgressive.
Even when it became sort of okay to be queer,
he was beyond queer.
I have to sort of take Burroughs and Warhol as two parallel figures
two people who in the late 50s and early 60s
stood up for what they believed in.
Made no pretense about it, were totally upfront about it.
At that time that was absolutely outrageous.
It's hard for people who didn't live in those times to know.
When I moved to America in 1965,
you could not mention the word homosexuality
without everyone thinking you were gay.
It was really just verboten.
And it's because of Burroughs and Warhol,
and what followed in their wake,
that the whole gay liberation movement sprung up.
How old were you when you had sex?
137147 -No, 16.
167 -At boarding school.
Okay, so you had sex when you were 167? With who?
With the boy in the next bunk.
William's boyfriends were a series of obsessions,
usually more or less foredoomed.
Well first of all, his cousin, Prynne Hoxie, in St. Louis,
who went off to a different university, Princeton,
and then died a year and a half later in a drunken accident in New York
he was decapitated by a tunnel.
And then he fell in love with a boy at Los Alamos Ranch school,
and there was a big disgrace, and Billy ran home to St. Louis
and couldn't go back to Los Alamos at all.
He sent off for his diaries and as he wrote
when the box arrived with the fearful diaries in it,
he couldn't wait to rip it open
and make sure he could destroy the offending pages.
Some of these things were examples
of how he had tried to write and why he had given up.
He says, fact is, I had gotten a sickener meaning, like, a jail sentence.
His boyfriends like Jack Anderson,
the one he cut his finger off over,
and who helped him wreck the family car
Lewis Marker, the American student at Mexico City College
who was probably pretty good intellectual company,
but was not going to commit his life to Bill Burroughs,
so, he very much was thinking of boyfriends
as members of a class different from him.
After I'd lived with William for several weeks,
and then began my relationship with Richard Elovich, my first lover,
I remember William commenting once,
"See, you and Richie have this idea about intellectual
and social equals being a couple.”
He says, "In my day that was just unheard of."
It was... an inter-class thing.
In the fall of '89, I met him at his old place,
his old stomping grounds in the Bowery, the Bunker.
At that time I was 18, I was a freshman in college.
I was already basically Allen Ginsberg's boyfriend
but it was kind of planned out that I would still hook up with William,
when and if the opportunity presented itself.
Were you sexually interested in me at that time?
Uh... not particularly, I don't remember...
How come?
Because I was kind of cute, looking back.
It was like an ordinary relationship in one of his novels.
It was usually the theme of chasing after somebody
that didn't quite want to have anything to do with the author
of what you were reading.
Which was, I think, in Queer something that was shown
what his writings were for.
They were love letters to make the person he was interested in laugh.
Because they were almost comedy routines.
In a way, he was somebody who appeared
to be incredibly sad to me, as time went by.
Someone who'd been hurt.
For example, you read that William was crazy in love with Allen Ginsberg,
and that it was almost always an unrequited passion.
And I think that that disappointment
he had when he did fall in love,
which was so rare for him,
made him a lot more withdrawn, sexually and emotionally.
A lot more afraid of being vulnerable and then being hurt.
So he started to close down quite a lot, emotionally.
Do you want to be loved?
Oh, not really.
It depends by who or what?
By my cats, certainly.
There was something essentially alien about William,
and I think when it came to his physicality and his romantic life,
he was one of the most awkward people in the world.
While there was this facade of a gentleman,
there was a very lonely man underneath that three-piece suit.
And it was only once that I really heard him speak of someone
he was genuinely interested and obsessed with,
Mark Ewert, who he described as,
"a young man, having skin like alabaster."
One night I was like, you know, I should tell this guy I love him.
It was late at night, and I wasn't quite sure
if he'd already fallen asleep for the night or not.
So I kind of nudged him, and said, "William, William."
"Yeah?"
I said, "William, I love you. I love you William."
He said, "Huh? You love women?"
I said, "No, no. I love you, William."
And what did he say back?
He was like, "Oh. That's okay." Or something like that.
And kind of patted me.
But then the question is, what did he feel towards me,
or what did he feel towards other human beings in general?
I remember reading this interview with him,
where he was talking about nuclear war,
and he said that all of a sudden he just starting sobbing.
Which, first of all,
it was really hard for me to picture him sobbing, period.
But what he was sobbing about is,
he said he'd all of a sudden been thinking about nuclear war
and he was struck with this horrific thought
of "what would "happen to my cats, my six cats, if I died?"
And that that just wrecked him.
You can see that cats were these kind of pure, spirit beings for him.
And I remember some of our very first conversations
the first night I met him were about endangered species,
and about lemurs that he was really into.
And I think it was
that was just a really safe place for his love to flow.
His animals, and his cats, and these lemurs.
I don't think that means that that love was false,
but I definitely had the sense that it was all kind of flowing
in this fairly narrow channel that would probably have been too hard for him,
in this lifetime, to show for other people.
And I hope in whatever his next lifetime is nowadays
that it's easier for him, and not so threatening.
On the one side, he's kind of this loosey-goosey liberal of his time,
where sexuality is free-spirited
and all that sort of thing.
But I don't think he engaged in that
all that comfortably.
I think he had conflict around his sexual orientation
I don't think that was always clear to him.
I think he struggled with homophobia, like lots of people his age.
There are areas of his life that he himself never understood.
Quite clearly a number of things happened to him
when he was very little.
He was possibly abused
by his nanny's boyfriend, and things like this.
And he spent a lot of time in psychoanalysis
trying to find out about these things.
And he has talked about it, but it's just too deeply buried.
He was never really able to find out.
Do you think people should charge for sex?
I think so.
Well it depends on the circumstances.
Can I ask you another... it's nothing personal.
You said you like young boys.
Is it easier to have a relationship with them than to, like... not just sex?
Can you go out and have dinner with them? Can you talk to them?
- In many cases no. - They don't have a concentration.
But I don't require that. I don't require that at all.
When we first met him in the 70s,
he was living in London,
and it was an Irish hustler called John
who was sharing the apartment with him,
who used to hang out in Piccadilly
doing something or another sexually to get money.
And William always seemed to prefer young hustlers,
because there was no need for an emotional attachment.
There was no danger of being embroiled beyond a controllable point.
So I think that was one of the reasons he began to,
almost exclusively,
look for sexual pleasure
amongst professional, young hustlers.
There was too much fear of pain to go into a relationship form of love.
You talk about keeping yourself open, being able to see...
Is that something that you keep at bay, this idea of possesion,
is that something you don't want to have happen?
Oh, yes, generally speaking, yes.
But there is a difficult question there.
Unless you're laying yourself open to experience,
that's the only way you can experience, but also there is a danger
of laying yourself open to something that is very injurious.
- How do you know that... - You don't.
That's just it. It's like the...
When you let your immunity down you can get AIDS.
That is always a problem of being receptive,
but the same time able to defend yourself against injurious attacks and influences.
Because they are sure to be there.
It's like a disease organism.
William had a very uneasy relationship with women,
in the sense that
there weren't too many women around.
But I felt that I had a very nice relationship with him
and maybe it was because we really weren't gender-identified
when we were together.
We traded recipes,
but I would say that in that world, particularly if you're at the Bunker,
and you're going into the bathroom,
and you're looking at Keith Haring's drawing of the penis
it's not the world that you would expect.
I had the biggest crush on William.
Really a big one.
And I used to even daydream about, you know,
he would fall in love with me and we would get married
I mean, I had a huge crush on William.
And he knew it, too, and it didn't bother him at all.
When the two of us were alone, he'd say,
"Well, my dear, it's the end of the night.
Let's hear a little Bobby Shaftoe,"
and I would sing him the little song:
Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea Silver buckles on his knee.
One fine day he'll marry me Pretty Bobby Shaftoe.
There was another one:
Oh dear, what can the matter be.
Dear, dear, what can the matter be.
Oh dear, what can the matter be.
Johnny's so long at the fair.
And he encouraged me to sing, before I sang publicly.
I think, actually, William loved Brion Gysin more than anybody.
(Burroughs) He was my friend of many years
painter, writer, musician and raconteur extraordinaire
boy, could he tell a story.
His studies of North African music and magic,
of Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, and well as his own painting and writing,
were influential upon a whole generation of creative individuals
who went on to launch the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s.
He was at ease with the "Rolling Stones",
the musicians of ancient Jajouka,
with the princesses and dutchesses of Europe,
and the young emigrees who flocked to the Beat Hotel in Paris in the 1950s.
When we lived there and began our collaboration,
Brion invented the dream machine and the cut-up method,
and his ideas were crucial to my own development as a writer.
The cut-up was invented by Brion Gysin in the Beat Hotel.
He wanted to set up a board for his artwork,
and he had some newspapers on a table.
And he cut through the board using a Stanley blade,
and he cut through the newspapers and when he looked at the newspapers,
he realigned the pages of type, and he could see that the words
made a particular kind of sense, almost like a telepathic sense.
And he felt that he had discovered something truly fantastic,
and showed it to William Burroughs.
And he was just so inspired,
and was able to really do terrific cut-ups.
In fact, William produced three cut-up novels.
William had read a lot in philosophy
the nature of consciousness, and science, and mind travel
magic, tantraism, genetics, the cloning worlds, looking at semantics,
looking at intrinsic nature, looking at impermanence,
looking at how we name and qualify, and where does that come from.
His dedication to altered states, and knowledge,
and tinkering with consciousness,
that as well always leads one into conflict with the powers that be,
because that too is an illegal activity.
(Burroughs) Flicker administered under large dosage and repeated later
could well lead to overflow of the brain areas, sounds and even odors,
that is a categorical characteristic of the consciousness
expanding grey waters produced many of the phenomena,
anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways.
The first things that William was investigating,
as a personal crusade or as a personal philosophy,
all of those things made him an outcast,
an outsider, and an outlaw, quite literally.
When you have someone who's knowingly choosing to be outside the law,
or to refuse to accept the template of legality
that some society has imposed upon them,
then you have the potential for some degree of chaos,
or destruction of that status quo, that nonsense is reality.
So William chose a path that he knew would bring him
into conflict with the powers that be,
with social norms and with the legal system.
And he chose it because it would be intolerable to him
to be a hypocrite and hide away his real sense of being.
I bring not peace, but a sword!
It's no mistake that the main obsession of Burroughs was control.
The first time we met, in 1971,
just before we left his apartment he said to me,
"How do you short-circuit control?
That's what I want you to spend your time thinking about"
meaning my life.
And that's basically what we've done.
As long as you don't decide not to either react or say,
but just sort of hide and be a hypocrite,
then you're doing their job.
People do it in different ways.
But no, I think William was a very political, radical, anarchist man.
In Oklahoma
they found a tiny little bit of pot down by his right leg.
He got life in prison without parole.
A miniscule amount.
- Where? In America? - Oklahoma.
His upbringing was middle-class, but he had a housekeeper
who introduced him to opium.
So it's not surprising that he went in the direction that he went.
Well, you've got the "Yage Papers",
he's the only guy I've ever known to take yage,
which is the absolute sine qua non of hallucinogenic drugs.
He's also the guy that Timothy Leary
and Baba Ram Dass came over to Morocco
and had him try psilocybin.
He's the only guy I've ever heard of or known
to take the original CIA's version of LSD, LSD-6,
which is like a horse-pill of insanity
I mean the stuff that I did as a hippie in the 60s
was like bubble-gum,
it was fool's gold compared to the extensive experiences that guy had.
He was a walking pharmacologist, an encyclopedia of it.
(Burroughs) There's a junk gesture that marks the junkie
like the limp wrist marks the fag.
The hand swings out from the elbow, stiff-fingered, palm up.
William Burroughs sure, he romanticized drug use,
but not in the way people usually think of as romantic.
I think no one had written about it, nobody had read about it,
it was a hidden, terrible thing.
That someone wrote about it in any kind of joyous way, which he did
joyous and terrible and wonderful sure, he did romanticize it.
Did anyone read "Naked Lunch" and try heroin?
Probably. So what?
That doesn't mean that book shouldn't be read.
I'm for anybody that writes about their obsession,
and shows a murderer can write a book about how great it is to murder,
that doesn't mean it's not a good book.
What the breakthrough of the late 50s was, after "Howl",
was a breakthrough to those people who lived in America
and were American but were never focused on.
So the whole question of narcotics
even with the fantastic thing that Burroughs conceived of,
the idea that there were junkies in America
was something of a social breakthrough.
Burroughs was cool, particularly in his persona.
Usually when we think of cool in the context of the hip world,
the Beat world, we're thinking of the difference between alcohol and heroin.
Hip people who liked to take dope, or were addicted to it,
they thought it was the pinnacle of coolness to go score a bag,
maybe of Doctor Nova
they even had, like, William's own brand, in a way,
or many brands
score a glassine bag of this and take it to the Bunker
to share it with the Pope of Dope.
On the street outside of Rivington and Bowery
was a big pick-up place.
Junkies for five blocks going east.
Howard, it was discovered he said, John, I scored
for William, and they shot up together.
Howard had, at that time, had to be HIV-positive
but William, having seniority,
shot up first.
William shot up many times,
people came and visited him,
but he always got the first shot, so he never got AIDS.
I thought that was pretty great.
I mean, everyone died!
Sadly so...
There's always the question of
someone who has the glamour image that,
say, Burroughs had, or Keith Richards has,
or Lou Reed has,
where they're seen to kind of glamorize using heroin,
seems like a very cool sort of thing, you know.
But if you read everything William wrote about heroin,
it was to warn people not to take it.
And he was using it as a sort of image or symbol of control.
This is the ultimate control
you have to buy the product or else you're sick.
I'm doing this press conference with him.
I said, Bill, you know,
I had this migraine last night,
I came across these pills in my medicine cabinet,
I took a couple of Percodans.
His eyes went, what?!
I said, "Well what are they?"
And he said, "What do you mean, what are they?"
I said, "Well what is Percodan?"
And he put his face about an inch from mine and said,
"It's junk!" and walked away.
And I sat there with my metaphorical ass spanked.
And immediately saw the distinction between this actor,
who was acting Bill Lee and his addictions, and a guy who, like,
roamed the world in a sewer, hooked on this shit.
That said, that whole incident, with him leveling me with,
"It's junk," was like a laser through me,
about everything else in my life that I'm doing
or taking on a whim not just pills
sex, or careerism, or cigars, or whatever, that I think,
I can get by, I can wing this for today,
I can hold my breath through this now, because it's not the real deal.
And then all of a sudden you wake up and it is the real deal.
It is a life handed to you on a toilet seat,
rather than a silver platter.
He opened the tunnel to a way out.
'Cause if you're doing something and you want to stop,
you're not going to stop until you figure out what it is you're actually doing.
The legend is that he went to London and kicked it
with the apomorphine cure in 1956.
The reality is that he was chipping around, off and on,
to one extent or another, his whole life.
I mean, when I met him in '74 he was not taking it, except, you know,
to gobble a pill of whatever, but within two years he was again.
And that time it got such a grip on him that the breakthrough
there was to enroll in the methadone maintenance program.
His physician was named Dr. Harvey Carcass.
Give me something to shoot!
I want something to shoot!
This great big mamba-jamba
was a gift from Hunter Thompson.
It's a .454 Cassul,
it was the biggest handgun manufactured at the time.
The gun that he carried the most, when I was around him,
was a .38 Smith & Wesson snubby,
and he just carried it on his belt with him at all times.
Although there was a couple of times
when he was going to the barbershop, or the doctor,
and it would make people uncomfortable to look down
and see this old man with a big piece on his belt.
So Michael didn't want him to wear the big gun,
so I think the compromise they worked out was that he would carry Derringers,
rather than a big pistol on his belt.
But when he was at home he always had a gun on,
he slept with a gun under his pillow...
When we slept together in bed,
was there a loaded gun in a holster in the bed with us?
Why yes, there was a loaded gun in a holster in the bed with us.
There were guns everywhere in his house. Everywhere.
I remember one of the first nights
we were sleeping together in his place in Kansas,
and I'm sticking my feet down under the covers
and my foot hits some bump, some really hard bump,
and I'm like, "William, what is that?"
And he's like, "Oh, it's a gun."
And I'm like, "Oh, is that gun loaded?"
And he's like, "Oh, yeah, always keep it loaded,
that way you don't have to worry about whether it's loaded or not."
This is a silencer.
This was in William's basement.
Take like a .38
and shoot it in the basement
there was a target across the basement
upstairs,
this is what you'd hear.
A little louder than that.
That's a gun going off.
And you wouldn't even
people would be sitting at the dining table,
and we'd come up from the basement and say, "Did you hear that?"
And they'd say, "What?"
It was shooting six rounds of .38s.
I would imagine
he got a feedback high out of it,
in the sense that this is better than shooting heroin
I mean, you shot something else and it went bang.
He had a fascination with guns that was all his own.
I've often wondered what it sprung from
whether it was being gay,
and being subjected to the kind of abuse
that gay people sometimes find themselves
and he was a slight man, he was never a big guy.
And whether that made him feel more secure,
because I know he always had a gun at home.
He talked about defending himself
I think half his fantasy life
was what he would do if somebody did something.
Like when there was a dog attacking us
on the way to Dylan's, man
he had 14 different plans of how to take care of that.
Burroughs himself, he said you always have to have three lines of defense.
He had the sword-cane, that, if you pressed a button,
it became a spear.
He had a cane, but he knew the art of cane fighting,
he studied it, he had a book on it;
And then he had the Cobra,
and he also had a sharp knife that he could flick out real fast.
He studied all these arts of self-defense.
In his writing, you see he's always pushing
himself to the limits
over psychic limits.
And the feeling of danger that is evoked by that
was something that intrigued him about snakes.
Snakes represented, among other things,
a form of weaponry to William Burroughs.
The injection process of snake venom is very,
very similar to the projectile firing ability of a gun.
He was also very fascinated with the addictive properties of snake venom.
Kim, if you had your choice,
would you rather be a poisonous snake or a non-poisonous snake?
Poisonous, sir, like a green mamba or a spitting cobra.
Why?
I'd feel safer, sir.
Safer?
Yes, sir.
Dead people are less frightening than live ones.
It's a step in the right direction.
Young man, I think you're an assassin.
I wrote him a letter,
where I offered to send him a gaboon viper.
And I did this ending my letter with something almost like a threat
if I do not hear from you,
a positive or negative reply, you may consider the snake in transit.
So he rapidly responded.
If fact I got two or three quick letters
where he was begging me not to send the gaboon viper.
But I did also get an invitation to his house.
In those days I often carried snakes around in suitcases.
So he wanted to see the snakes feed think I had a rattler in there,
and a couple of copperheads
and I put a mouse or a small rat in there for them to eat it.
The rat had jumped out of the way evidently not going to get bitten
so William just blindly, thoughtlessly, reached in there with his hand,
and grabbed the mouse or rat to move it into position
so that the snake could bite it.
And when he did that, at that moment, the snake struck.
I think it just grazed his hand, just brushed his hand.
I was very nearly responsible for killing William Burroughs on that trip,
when he reached in.
Very brave guy but I don't think so cautious as he should have been.
He'd go have some cocktails with Fred,
and then come out say, "See now, my hand is really steady now."
Well, a few vodka-cokes will do that for you.
But the thing about William, and Tom does this as well as I do,
is that he'd be "Now, did I tell you about the...",
and he'd have a drink,
and you'd think it was going to go over, he's got to fall down
I could have wound up as an alcoholic academic.
"Will he get tenure?"
Now William, for a while, rented this cottage.
And one time, I'm told I was out of town
he put some bales of hay against that stone wall over there.
I hear about it and I thought, oh my gosh,
it's a wonder he's still alive.
Because of course the bullets went through the bales of hay
and came right back.
Patricia tells a story that one time he was out here doing that
and he had some bottles of black ink
apparently dangling from strings.
So the old man's standing here blasting away,
and suddenly he goes back,
and there's this great big splotch on his forehead.
And of course the first impulse, I guess,
whoever was with him thought he'd shot himself.
But then they noticed it wasn't red, it was black.
Apparently a piece of glass from the bottle had ricocheted back and hit him.
It's a miracle he lived as long as he did with all of the things that he did.
Joan Vollmer was Edie Kerouac-Parker's roommate.
Everybody thought she was this incredible, charming,
intelligent woman,
and she should meet William Burroughs.
So they started to hang out together, they did drugs together.
William was also seeing men, and Joan suffered from that.
By the time they got to Mexico City,
Joan was doing a lot of benzedrine inhalers,
and drinking a lot and so on.
(Narrator) William Burroughs had just returned to Mexico City from a long trip
with Lewis Marker, his young boyfriend.
At a small homecoming party thrown by his wife,
Burroughs drunkenly proposed the idea of moving to South America
where he could hunt wild boar.
Joan joked that if Bill were their hunter,
they'd starve to death.
Burroughs, taking the bait, dared Joan to,
"Show the boys what kind of a shot old Bill is," ala William Tell.
Putting a gin glass on her head, she turned sideways, giggled,
and said, "I can't look you know I can't stand the sight of blood."
William Burroughs fired and missed the glass,
landing a fatal shot through Joan's forehead.
For somebody like Burroughs it's a toy.
I mean, he's playing William Tell with a .45, for gosh sake.
I think they were probably drunk or stoned,
and they were playing around like playing Russian Roulette
same kind of thing.
Put the apple on your head, he tried to shoot if off and missed.
I mean, it was hideous. It's like a comedy sketch, almost.
Allen Ginsberg thought that that might have been some
kind of a death wish on her part.
I think Allen was very emotionally invested
in saving William, helping William,
healing William... and understanding it himself,
not seeing it as an act of complete carelessness and violence,
or that there was some strange, dark underpinning.
But something clearly some energy was out of control.
(Narrator) The accident left their two children without a mother.
Julie, Joan's daughter from a previous marriage,
was taken by her grandparents.
William never saw her again.
Their son, Billy Burroughs Jr.,
went on to live a short and troubled life.
Despite William's conflicting stories about the incident,
he managed to leave Mexico and never went to prison.
Of Joan, Burroughs later commented,
"am forced to the appalling conclusion
that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death."
(Burroughs) "There are mistakes too monstrous for remorse
to tamper or to dally with"
Edward Arlington Robinson.
Anyone who's never made mistakes like that,
and paid for his mistakes,
I trust him little in the commerce of the soul.
The best he could have meant by that would have been,
remorse was hubristic.
To even entertain remorse was prideful,
and predicated on the idea that you could fix it,
that you had the power to fix it.
One of his most extraordinary pieces
is that introduction to "Queer."
Because he said those things often here,
in the passing of the decades, sort of drunk and alone
and he'd talk about it in terms of something that had happened
at the moment of synchronicity
something happening and it causing you to have a reaction
and you don't know what it is.
And he often talked about how in Mexico City
he was walking down the street and he started crying.
And, you know, William was very tough,
so he'd cry for ten seconds, and continue walking
all those winding streets in old Mexico.
And this happened three of four times.
And he was walking to meet Joan at 5:00 in that bar.
He didn't know why he was crying.
And then only after she's dead, he remembers this.
The idea is that your mind synchronicity, or whatever
that your mind foresees, or sees this thing that's going to happen
in the immediate future and you're reacting to it,
you're weeping from the horror of it.
Toward the end of his life
we all gathered, and we all performed for him,
and I decided to read from the introduction to Queer.
And I was reading it, very concentrative,
and I tend to improvise when I read.
So in reading something so intimate of his,
I was also aware that he would be fully concentrating
on how I would read it, and what I might discover within in it.
And all of a sudden I just went off.
It's like my tongue was tied, and I just started babbling a bit.
And when I finished, everybody was
it was just a split-second of total silence,
because it was sort of a heavy moment.
And then I finished.
And afterwards I went up to William
and I didn't know whether to apologize
I didn't know what to say.
And he just took my hand, and his eyes looked almost teary,
and he just said, "Thank you."
So, I would... It's like hypnotizing someone.
I just feel that if William had any question in his mind
whether it was an accident, that whatever I channeled,
whether it be from the air, or from William himself,
helped to set that at rest.
The negativity of that karma propelled him to be a writer.
He had to fight his way out of a black paper bag
by becoming a writer of the negative karma that he because he loved Joan.
He was a gay man but he had a wife and he loved her.
They had a life together.
It was a great tragedy for him.
I don't think if you have an accident like that
that doesn't mark you for life.
Mark what it means to hold a gun;
Mark what it means to play around with it
when you've done that.
I'm sure that that accident haunted him.
For sure... yeah.
(Narrator) After killing his wife,
William Burroughs moved to Tangier, Morocco,
where he struggled with his heroin addiction.
There, in the form of notes, journal entries and letters
to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac,
he excavated the literature that would become the novel "Naked Lunch".
Burroughs is a fairly foreboding character
in his novels.
I mean I find Burroughs to be hilariously funny.
Some people are like, oh gosh, "Naked Lunch", it's obscene!
All these guys getting hung, all this jism, all this disgusting
what's missing from that reading of Burroughs is, it's totally funny.
It's like this burlesque,
but the material he's using is the raw images of the unconscious.
William Burroughs was alien to many people,
and definitely to mainstream, Western culture he was alien.
And it's only an alien that would have the circumspection
to write about Western culture like he did in "Naked Lunch".
"Naked Lunch" stood out because it was so different.
It was a novel that knocked people out, or repulsed them.
It also inaugurated the whole era of hip,
because it was SO subversive
that it had its own cachet.
(Narrator) In 1962, the novel was tried in Boston, Massachusetts for obscenity.
The courts charged that it contained child murder and pedophilia.
Burroughs' supporting witnesses included Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer.
It would be the last major literary censorship hearing in the United States.
Eventually, in 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Court overturned the ban,
ruling that the book did indeed have redeeming social value,
and it was henceforth widely published in the United States.
It won all the censorship stuff because there were no laws against that yet.
They didn't know gay people that did heroin that bragged about it,
and talked about it, and made it seem appealing.
That was not on the law book
it was thinking up something that wasn't even illegal yet.
And that book was so passionate, and at the beginning
you can't have a better press agent than a censor.
Especially in the 50s and 60s.
This is William speaking under attack
for "Naked Lunch" being pornographic.
So he says,
"Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic
were written as a tract against capital punishment,
in the manner of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal!
"These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment
"as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism
"that it is, as always the lunch is naked.
"If civilized societies want to return to the druid hanging rites
"in the sacred grove, or to drink blood with the Aztecs,
"or feed the Gods with blood of human sacrifice,
"let them see what they actually eat and drink,
let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon."
Man is carried in naked by two negro bearers
who dropped him on the platform with bestial, sneering brutality.
The man wriggles, his skin turns to viscid,
transparent jelly that drifts away in green mist
I think Burroughs' writings,
particularly "Naked Lunch", were quite revolutionary.
They talked about things that nobody talked about,
especially in America which was, I would say,
rather more sexually repressed,
because of the puritan traditions of America and so on.
It wasn't just homosexuality,
it was his alien sexuality.
In the 60s it became quite political with the Yippies.
If they had a very definite program,
then most of those objectives were realized:
End the Vietnam War, legalization of pot,
end of censorship,
recognition of minority rights
most of those objectives had been at least...
When Bill withessed such an event
he wrote about it.
And what you get in the writing is what he saw.
I mean, he said all the obvious things it was a fascist state,
it was frightening.
In Grant Park, when the police were approaching,
he wondered if he'd be able to withstand it
or if he would break and run.
He was worried about that, and also he was worried about
his ability to move fast enough to get away, because after all,
most people were kids and he was in his late 50s at that point.
Yeah, Allen Ginsberg was more of a hippie.
Hippies always got on my nerves.
We were punks without knowing we were punk
we looked like hippies, but we had punk values.
William was much more up our alley,
my friends,
because he was angry, and caused trouble, and was not politically correct.
Where Allen was politically correct within the hippie movement,
Burroughs was not even politically correct in the hippie movement.
There's a real connection
between the Beats and the punks.
The punks really are neo-Beats.
Much of the punk philosophy or lifestyle or attitude
you know, punk was a very good word to use.
Right in that period of time that I met him, in '75,
his works were influencing punk rock.
And I guess early queer culture
was kind of born in punk rock,
I always thought.
Don't forget, he had that column,
"Time of the Assassins", in "Crawdaddy" magazine
back in those days.
"Crawdaddy" was a fairly widely-read rock magazine.
So, putting himself into that context,
he was opening up the door to these younger kids,
who probably only read one of his books, like probably "Junky" if anything,
but really kind of adored him as the godfather of punk,
which is what he became.
And also you have to remember that Bill lived on the Bowery,
five blocks down from CBGB's,
in an area where many of the punk-rock stars lived.
So he really was kind of in that world.
I remember Patti Smith at St. Mark's poetry project in '74, after a reading,
ended it by telling everybody that William Burroughs was back in town.
Isn't that great? Welcome to New York, William Burroughs!
William, I was just in Amsterdam,
and I hadn't played in Amsterdam since we were there...
He would read in Max's, and Patti Smith would read, or sing,
and it was like the early punk movement,
and he was connected to that.
He came to CBGB's all the time when we were developing our work,
and through the 70s he could be seen sitting there
like the royalty that he was.
There are many passages in William's books
particularly in "Naked Lunch" and "The Wild Boys",
in which he prophesied punk rock.
William had a vision of the future that was parallel to punk rock.
This idea of a pack of boys, or a pack of androgynous souls,
scooting into the future with sores, and scarlet fever visions,
and just the whole movement of Johnny, in the "Wild Boys",
and my first album, "Horses",
is littered with Burroughs-type references.
Punk rock was influenced by Burroughs,
because I looked upon punk-rock as this huge, international,
anti-authoritarian,
cultural rediscovery and re-creation revolution.
I mean, you were trying to up-end all the categories and hierarchies,
you were totally anti-authoritarian, and you were after these voices
that had been neglected, because they weren't giving you the values
of the middle-class, bourgeois society.
In the sense that punk was all about
trying to tell the truth, and be anti-authoritarian,
and be black humor,
I think Burroughs is totally punk rock, and a role model.
It's funny, the punk rock thing was really exciting for him,
more so than counter-culture, 60s kind of music.
I remember in '77 seeing Burroughs.
He read that piece "Bugger the Queen"
it was so hip that he did that,
the audience was just completely amazed that he did that.
He said, "English rock group the 'Sex Pistols'"
wrote a song called 'God Save the Queen'
he sort of commended it, he said, "I'd like to further the sentiment
with a piece I wrote called "Bugger the Queen'."
And he would read these verses, and then he would, like,
exclaim each one with, Bugger the Queen!
And the whole audience would join in every time,
with "Bugger the Queen™!"
We went to his house and couple times and hung out,
you know, shot super-8 film and photos and whatnot,
and just kind of hung out with William a little bit.
He showed us around his backyard,
we saw the different things he had going on out there.
And he built this box called the Orgone Box,
it was like an outhouse almost, or something like that,
a bunch of plywood sheets put together with a little hole cut in the door,
and you would sit in there and
I think Reich's theory was that sitting in there
would allow you to gather certain accumulations of Orgone Energy,
as he called it.
They're kind of hard to explain, but I gather that they have something
to do with him feeling that any lacks in one's life
had something to do with not being able to achieve a true and pure orgasm.
I think he thought rock and roll was bull shit... it mostly is!
But then, so are most novels!
So, you know,
but yeah, I don't think he felt any great affinity for all that.
A lot of the pioneers of punk had read Burroughs extensively,
like Iggy Pop and Lou Reed,
and Will Shatter from "Negative Trend".
Some of the ideas kind of trickled
into people's work,
and then other people absorbed that work
not knowing how much of it
had come from Burroughs.
"Lust for Life" by Iggy Pop has
Johnny Yen, and hypnotizing chickens, and
I just thought it was really cool.
I wrote a song called "Gimme Some Skin,"
which is one of my most depraved-sounding numbers, apparently people say.
I love it.
And I talk about him in it.
I was 23 when I wrote it.
And there's one of his characters, in a reference to him,
and the lyric is.
Typhoid Mary she got soul.
Sucks all night on and old asshole.
Whip it on out, whip it on
in Give it to me honey, you gotta gimme some skin.
And then the second verse is
Billy Billy Lee ain't no fool.
All the junkies think he's cool.
It's a good vocal, you should hear it some time
mocks singing it punk style.
Certainly someone like Dylan took a lot of inspiration,
as a wordsmith, from stuff that Allen and William were doing
the way they were approaching language and what they were writing.
You know very, sort of, modern kind of approach to language,
and using it to uncover different truths.
And I think that's why people
in the music community
have responded to William's work,
because there were a lot of ideas
that he could take off from.
One of the early "Dead Kennedys" songs,
the b-side of our first single, was "The Man With the Dogs".
The song itself, the lyrics were just not coming together,
I couldn't figure out how I wanted to tell the story,
or what belonged where, and it was just kind of a big mess.
And so I finally threw up my hands and figured,
what have I got to lose, I'm going to try the Burroughs method,
I'm going to cut up every single line of this song,
and move it around until I get something I like.
And sure enough, it worked.
Some of the examples of this, sometimes when I realize
I'm going to do this in advance the rough drafts sometimes
have to be kept in plastic bags and come out more like this
this is Vulcanus 2000 from a later Lard project.
(Burroughs) Fight tuberculosis, folks,
Christmas Eve, an old junkie selling
Christmas seals on North Park Street.
"The Priest" they called him.
Fight tuberculosis, folks...
The medium of the counter-culture was collaboration,
beginning with the obvious example of a rock group.
We were having a good old time in the Bunker there,
and in the midst of the conversation we got to Marlene Dietrich.
Marlene apparently canceled all her Australian tour because she was so drunk.
Could not, would not heal.
She refused to listen, or even discuss
the possibility of surgery.
Well, that's the kind of bitch she was.
And he started singing "Falling in Love Again," ” in German,
and to me that signaled the beginning of the record
well, here's another William.
Any artistic description or any artistic transliteration
is got to unprecise.
I'd probably be... If I was a painter or I could illustrate
some of my dreams they'd be much closer.
But words are pretty awkward, to...
Often I'm describing very, not only very complicated
but very unfamiliar... scenes.
And it's never going to be any more than an approximation.
Unfortunately.
It's not so easy, if you're a really great writer like William,
to go over and work with visuals.
And he succeeded.
Somehow it flowered at the end of his life
and he was able to do all of these great visual works.
William always claimed
that it was Brion's death in '86
that liberated him to become an artist.
We had been shooting out here for several years,
when one day William and the people who would drive him out here showed up,
and they had some cans of spraypaint.
So they took the cans of spraypaint
and they suspended them in front of the plywood.
And William started blasting the spraypaint over the plywood.
And that was the start, at least to my knowledge,
of the shotgun art.
In my own feelings about guns- over-the-top, fake macho stuff.
It didn't have, for me, the richness as a work of art that his writing did.
Fake macho is funny to me.
Part of art is all irony, it's making fun of everything.
Contemporary art is about ruining things.
So if he's ruining what masculinity and guns are, good.
You mentioned your art, are you still the shotgun art?
- All kinds. - All kinds?
Yes, that's right. Brush work, shotgun
paint knife... it's a number of things.
What's the exact process you use? You set up the cans?
There is no exact process.
For one, with the shotgun art, you take a piece of plywood,
put a can of spraypaint in front of it, and shoot it with a shotgun.
As it sprays across your surfaces, there's no possibility of predicting
what pattern you will get.
I went to the L. A .County Museum where he had an art show,
and in the courtyard of the museum there were all these glitterati,
and Absolut had a booth
and they were serving 'Burroughs',
because his drink is vodka and Coke.
And so, after we had the little soiree,
they took us for a tour of the show.
So we started going down the line of all of the paintings,
and we got to one which was this piece of plywood that had this angle on it.
Well I remember the guy's roof that the plywood came off,
and I had to chuckle because here it was,
this scrap of plywood that had been sitting over there,
and now it's got a price tag of like seven thousand dollars on it,
and it's sitting in the L.A. County Museum of Art
John Wheeler of Recognition Physics says,
nothing exists until it is observed.
The artist observes something invisible to others,
and puts on paper or canvas something that did not exist until he observed it.
Obviously he had some shorthoods as a father.
Even though his son's books, I think, were really, really good
he was very, very talented.
But you read that biography, it was a terrible, terrible, wounded life.
So was William a goof father? No.
(Narrator) Billy Burroughs Jr. Had little contact with his father,
whom he tried to emulate.
He father continued to neglect him,
so Allen Ginsberg often came to Billy's rescue.
Billy wrote two books about his struggle with alcohol and drugs.
He was one of the first people in the United States
to get a liver transplant.
But by 1981, at the age of 33, Billy was dead, of acute alcoholism.
He was here, and James was here,
and I was upstairs when Billy died.
10:30 in the morning, James comes upstairs
and knocks on my door and says, John I have to talk to you,
something very serious has happened.
Billy has died.
So we go downstairs and I come in here, and I hugged William
and it's the only time in my life I saw William crying.
I hugged him, and as I'm hugging him there are these things,
these great tears coming not for very long,
I mean William is William but he cried for a few minutes,
and then he went into his bedroom and closed his door.
It was deep grief.
He was devastated.
And he felt incredibly guilty about that.
That he knew he hadn't been present enough
in William, Jr.'s life,
had ignored him for years on end,
and was finally becoming his friend and it was too late.
And William, Jr. was trying to emulate his father for approval,
in the most destructive possible ways, in the most simplistic ways
if I become a junkie and write a book about a drug
then I'll be like dad and dad will love me.
And it was a tragic situation,
to see the youngest William destroying himself very publicly,
in front of William Sr., to try and be accepted as an equal,
as a part of the Beatnik family rather than the blood family.
And William just didn't know how to deal with that,
how to express himself.
(Narrator) After Billy's death,
Burroughs adopted his companion and secretary James Grauerholz.
Together, the two left New York and moved to Lawrence, Kansas,
where William spent the remainder of his life.
I came to Lawrence with the intention of luring Burroughs to Lawrence.
Because he was reaching an age where it was kind of time to retire.
All this layout expensive layout.
Look at that place... pigs!
It was an alternative to the heroin scene of the Bowery.
And I think James undoubtedly saved William,
if not from drugs from some other misadventure.
William and Bockris might fantasize about
being these impenetrable, grey men with canes,
fighting off young, would-be attackers,
but he was vulnerable.
An old man with a cane is just as weak as an old man without a cane.
What's your personal belief on death?
Well, as I've often said, how do you know that you aren't dead already?
No, but quite seriously, the Bardo, the period between death and rebirth,
which is supposed to be populated by some mythylogical monsters,
but I think it's much more likely if the monsters are too mythylogical,
that you've wised up, that this wasn't for real.
But if it was very much like your real life
you might very well be dead and not know it at all.
I was just going to say, those monsters are projections of your own mind.
Exactly, exactly, yes.
But as I've frequently said,
I do believe in the possibility of survival after death.
I think it's the only goal worth striving for.
He certainly became much more explicitly lovable
in his final year
gentle and sweet-tempered.
Not that he was so cantankerous and difficult before, but he
there was a transformation.
I talked to William when Allen died,
and it was incredibly hard.
And he died just months later.
It was as if there were some
well, with both of them these sparks went out of the world.
When we saw James Grauerholz, just after William had passed,
we met in Ginsberg's apartment in the East Village,
and he showed me a picture of William just after he died,
that someone had taken.
And... it really upset me.
It surprised me, I started crying.
And we said to James,
what sort of frame of mind was he in when he died?
And James said, well look what he wrote,
the last thing he wrote in his journal.
And we said, oh, thank gosh,
he managed to get there before he passed away.
He finally managed to say that.
But it took him a lifetime before he could say out loud
that love was part of an equation of existence.
Love? What is it?
Most natural pain killer what there is. LOVE.
I do believe in, kind of, saints that you can look up to when you're young
and you're starting out, and you don't fit in anywhere,
and you want to do something in the arts,
and you know really early that you want to do it,
and you know you're going to cause trouble
with what you want to do, and you don't care, really.
You don't want to fit in.
People don't like you in school but you don't care.
You don't want to be those people,
and you don't want to hang out with them in the first place.
So William, for those people, will always be almost a religious figure.
And I think that's wonderful, and I think he would like that.
Ours is just another skin That simply slips away.
You can rise above it It will shed easily.
It all will come out fine I've learned it line by line.
One common wire One silver thread.
All that you desire Rolls on ahead.
Like a ship in a bottle Held up to the sun.
Sails ain't going nowhere You can count every one.
Until it crashes unto the earth And simply slips away.
You can hide in the open Or just disappear.
It all will come out fine I've learned it line by line.
One common wire One silver thread.
All that you desire Rolls on ahead.
Ours is just a craving And a twist of the wrist.
Will undo the stopper With abrupt tenderness.
Die little sparrow And awake
singing it all will come out fine I've learned it line by line.
One common wire One silver thread.
All that you desire Rolls on ahead