American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (16 page)

The island of Gozo, 1967. Hot, dry, sand-coloured. Amenable to strangers. With the worst cuisine in the Mediterranean. Letters were exchanged with William Burroughs in London. And postcards. I found that it was possible to rent a house for a pound less than the
cost of the room where we lived on Haverstock Hill during the filming with Ginsberg. After the ease of setting up a documentary organized around the Dialectics of Liberation in the Roundhouse, the logical step was to offer the Germans a follow-up, a film on Burroughs. Negotiations began, but I was still operating on hope rather than expectation when we moved into the property owned by the manager of the famous TV glove puppet Sooty. Gozo was agricultural, Catholic, a patchwork of small fields and extravagant churches. On Christmas Eve, a village woman knocked on our door, bringing a gift, a small live chicken in a brown paper bag. Its meat was tough as shoe leather.

Checking the holdings of that time, as listed by Barry Miles in
A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive
(London 1973), I find that Burroughs kept six items relating to our potential film project. It’s an honour to sit on the page between Terry Southern (writer) and John Trevelyan (film censor). I follow on from Ian Somerville (systems advisor to WSB). And precede Kenneth Tynan (critic & writer), Tambimuttu (editor) and Alex Trocchi. A nice little snapshot of the era. My letters to Burroughs begin in December 1967 and finish in June 1968 (on my birthday). By which point, he had withdrawn into Scientology. And the Germans had decided that their interest in the counterculture ran out with Ginsberg. ‘We do not know Burroughs in Cologne.’

I worked through the Gozo mornings on the Burroughs script. After lunch, we walked, or sometimes cycled, down a rough track to the sea. It was warm enough to swim well into December. The clarity of light, by day, and the starry dome, when we sat out on the flat roof in the evenings, played against negative visions of the spectral Burroughs, hunkered down near Piccadilly, exploiting English sets left over from Graham Greene paperbacks, Edgar Wallace B-features, and sepia traces of that merchant mariner come ashore in Stoke Newington, Joseph Conrad.

My sense of Burroughs –
photo falling, word falling
– was of a man in a room. Or a photograph of a man in a room: draining the colour out, tapping dead veins. In England, in Bayswater hotels, bars, the
flat in Duke Street, he was visited by local disciples or enthusiasts, paying their respects. Writers – Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Jeff Nuttall – made contact with a figure they later recalled as an actor, a voice: a being as old and unforgiving as an Egyptian mummy. Burroughs is courteous, he responds, but he is not really
there.
Without moving his lips, he dictates the script. You find yourself ventriloquized by texts he has not yet composed or will never compose. The skin is made from a kind of liquid glass. Gazing into those mercury eyes, you are looking at a marmoreal version of your future self.

Ballard confirmed his Burroughs engagement through borrowed shifts of paranoid fragmentation, the forensic poetry of
The Atrocity Exhibition.
Moorcock composed
The Deep Fix
: ‘a drug which takes SEWARD into a world that looks like Earth’. The printed dedication reads: ‘For William Burroughs for obvious reasons.’ Jeff Nuttall used his encounter with El Hombre Invisible as justification for
My Own Mag
, a stapled mimeo mass of cut-ups, riffs and routines. A man called Douglas Lyne, who invited the Hackney novelist Roland Camberton to tape a Burroughs monologue, relished this courtly American exile as a fellow spirit, a decayed aristocrat with clubland manners and a colonialist thirst for gin. ‘For god’s sake, I can’t stand any more of this,’ said Lyne’s wife. ‘I want to go drinking with Bill.’

Editing footage of Ginsberg, in August 1967, in a cutting room in Amsterdam, I began to appreciate how image pulls away from sound. We struggled to match unsynched recordings to mute pictures. Dialogue loops began to develop a life of their own, instructions from a parallel universe. To take a break, I suggested a run to The Hague, where they were screening the Conrad Rooks movie
Chappaqua.
The film is shot by Robert Frank. Frank was born in Switzerland, from where Rooks had recently emerged after detoxing in a private clinic. The deal felt like a cold-turkey nightmare running at whim through an autopsy camera, with a cast of expensive cultural quotations labouring to play themselves: Jean-Louis Barrault, Ginsberg,
Ornette Coleman. And of course Burroughs. Who emerges relatively unscathed. His prose was always about performance, perfect pitch. We jump-cut. A ghost dance around upstate New York. Swiss psychiatric clinics (trust-fund addicts). Native American burial grounds. He is never compromised, never discommoded. Give him the grey hat, the velvet-collared coat, and he’s on. Tangier, 9 rue Git-le-Coeur. Duke St in St James’s. The Bunker at 222 Bowery. ‘Bill met very few people during his years in London,’ said Barry Miles. ‘He seemed to like it that way.’

‘A poet is a spy,’ Corso said. ‘God’s spy, you dig it? Like Keats. Spy for truth.’ We cruised into Lawrence with Corso’s story of the two hoods from St Louis in our heads. The small university town was so normal it was freakish. Kathy Acker, when we visited her in San Francisco, told me that, like all the other rock stars, actors, profile writers, she’d stopped off here, to pay her respects. ‘Burroughs was the only prose writer I could find who was a conceptualist.’ He welcomed her to his customized ambulance. They drove around town in winter evenings as the lights were coming on. It was Kathy’s role to act as bait for college boys. There are a lot of college boys in Lawrence. This was a vampire show she didn’t mind. She knew that it had potential as a future fiction, an anecdote. She was challenged once, she said, about the way Walter Abish lays out his text like a trap. Everything is calculated to such a fine degree in order to provoke a reaction from the reader. ‘I can’t do that,’ Acker responded. ‘The primary pleasure is not for the reader, it’s for me. I came back to San Francisco because I planned to sail around the world. We were very excited. It didn’t happen. We didn’t know how to sail.’

There is a shop hawking New Age skateboards.
PREPARE TO ENTER A NEW DIMENSION
. Skulls in helmets. A university bookstore with racks of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. 30
MINUTES PARKING. DRUG FREE SCHOOL ZONE
. I pull into an empty bay and, with malice aforethought, challenge Pavel to read the map and find the Burroughs property. He starts to bang his head against the window. An ambulance passes, lights flashing, siren on.

He was spending as much time now in the Land of the Dead as in Lawrence, Kansas. It was my impression that Burroughs chose this place in order to make that transition smoother; the twinned locations in the end were impossible to separate. Going out for eggs over easy, bacon, toast, coffee – and getting it, his order filled with a smile and a replenished cup – confirmed the fact that he was not yet in hell. In the dreams of beat hotels, bunkers with too many doors, trains like trains in Hitchcock movies (silver-smooth with back-projection lakes and snowy mountains), there were no breakfasts. It became an obsession: to score. To score even a cup of cold water with a shredded lettuce leaf floating in it. There are fast-food concessions in the Land of the Dead – of course there are – but they don’t have anything you can eat. Sullen waitresses ignore the impatient old man in the grey suit.

Like Anna again, Burroughs dreams about packing. He’s always cramming a suitcase with weapons he knows will be confiscated at the border by the same two officials; one paunchy, with gold teeth and a limp moustache, and the other in a white shirt and black tie; lean, mean, an ugly veneer of civilization. Charlton Heston in
A Touch of Evil
firing a cigarillo for that glinting shark’s-bite mouth.The Orson Welles film, a Mexico of the mind fabricated out of Venice Beach, California, is one of the most accurate precursors of the Land of the Dead where Burroughs finds himself as soon as he nods off.
My Education
is a travel journal of expeditions in company with his suicided boys and Egyptian cats who can walk through walls. His relatives are waiting, his mother sometimes lodges at his side. He can
smell
her powder.

Apart from an interest in alien abduction (he pays a visit to Whitley Strieber, author of
Breakthrough
), and sexual encounters of the third kind, Burroughs was most concerned with proving that the
dogmas of science were meaningless or totally misguided. He couldn’t accept that nothing moved faster than the speed of light. He spoke of clicking a switch fifteen years ago and seeing lights come on in an unvisited room:
today.
Changing sets is a simple matter, he explained: Morocco, Martinique, Manchester, context is everything. The taste of a cigarette will do it, even a photograph of the cigarette, visible traces of rent-boy saliva. One line from a book by Joseph Conrad will import, or predict, meteorological conditions. You can read yourself into a storm. But you can’t, when you’re asleep, conjure up a decent plate of ham and eggs. The dead are starving, but they can’t eat.

‘I have seen weather magic,’ Burroughs said. ‘I have even performed it. I stopped rain in Seattle.’

Time is a politician’s conceit. The reach of language, uncensored downloads from the third mind, is absolute: prophecy is never more than a statement of the obvious. Among the dream records Burroughs transcribes from ‘scraps of paper and index cards and pages typed with one hand’ are pre-vision/future-vision footage of ‘air crashes’. That feeling of being enclosed, trapped in the seat. Over Manhattan. ‘Very real.’ Then they land on the street.

He’s packing again. He has to escape. He thinks of: ‘St Louis or anywhere west of New York.’ Plague city. Hot dust. American smoke.
Photo falling, word falling.
Can’t breathe without scorching the lungs. ‘There is something terribly wrong here, some imminent disaster hangs in the air like a haze.’ Get out of town, fast. If two men are following you, there must be an unseen third. Burroughs uses Wichita as the excuse; he’s booked for a reading. As usual, he rehearses. His young assistants make the timings. ‘James says he was proud of me.’ On the road back to Lawrence in the ambulance: fridge, shower, toilet, bunk. Desolate country, burnt grass to sky for miles. Not one house. A few straggly trees, mulberry no doubt. The writer sits at his table, typing with one hand.

Suddenly, I’m hungry. It must be the Burroughs effect. We’re entering his force field. Serpentine brain waves push out from a photovoltaic
scanner, a radio mast. We must not arrive one minute early on Learnard Avenue. (
Lear
again: nothing comes of nothing.) We pull in at the EZ Food Store, a service station that doesn’t serve. The woman at the till stares open-mouthed at these black-suit Euro aliens. I feel like a funeral director who has rung the bell before the sheet has been pulled over the patient. She spoons gritty pink goo from a tub. Shoppers pick up their gun magazines and cases of root beer. If you are granted access to the washroom, you are given a key attached by a chain to a wooden ball. The thickest turd I have ever seen, a steaming green truncheon, is curled around the crusted bowl like a dead python.

I buy a street plan and pass it to Pavel. Who dates it, notes the price ($2.25), before hiding this latest horror deep inside his black satchel. The folded map, published in Wichita, has a Mormon graphic: a many-spoked yellow sunburst over a temple-mall called
Lied Center.
We don’t need maps. From this point, the car navigates itself.

We park across the street from the red weatherboard house with the neat white balcony. The most perverse writer in America has come to rest in a dappled Douglas Sirk avenue, where nothing moves. In our dark-windowed hired car, I pictured us as the two characters from Don Siegel’s film of
The Killers
, the odd-couple hitmen, Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager. And that becomes the motif of my memory-tape. We are not implicated in the complex weave of personal relationships in the ever-expanding Burroughs biography. We are accidental bureaucrats, hirelings in town for an afternoon to do a job.
Get the shot.

But Burroughs is far too canny, too long in the game. Pale sunlight across the table where he sits, waiting for the hour when he will take his first drink. Nothing to be said that has not been said a thousand times before. He talks property prices in Boulder and Lawrence. He reminisces about meeting Samuel Beckett in Berlin. Beckett stared at the wall. He had nothing to offer, beyond acknowledging that, yes, William Burroughs was indeed a writer.

The voice never rises above a gravel whisper. Time-travel has
drained the man of superfluous social energy. There will be no more readings in Wichita, no more film cameos. He can’t understand why every city he has visited in the last few years, when he comes to describe it, turns into Seattle. If there is an interview to be done, he’ll manage it on the telephone. The red house is the closing set. The Toronto trip, to promote David Cronenberg’s film of
Naked Lunch
, was a mistake. Nice hotel, no sleep. Excruciating pain, radiating down the left arm and up to the jaw. Popping nitro pills. ‘No way to detach yourself since there is no place to detach yourself to.’

On the occasional table, I notice a copy of Gore Vidal’s
Palimpsest.
I’d forgotten how Burroughs wrote about taking a fancy to the cocky young buck in the author photograph on the wrapper of
The Judgment of Paris
, back in 1952. ‘A nice clean Ivy League boy.’ They spent a session drinking together in the San Remo. This was before Kerouac’s one-night stand with Vidal in the Chelsea Hotel; which was fictionalized, in different registers, by both men. Norman Mailer, reading everything in lurid post-Hemingway psychosexual terms, said that when Vidal ‘removed the steel from Jack’s sphincter’, he buggered him into a vortex of booze and self-pity from which he would never escape.

Even in dream journals, Corso appears with his hand out. Burroughs complains of being tracked by bounty hunters. ‘What am I worth? Gregory always wants to borrow money.’ I pass over the letter Corso gave me in New York.

‘Humpffff.’

Burroughs slashes the envelope with a ceramic knife. ‘Best there is. Cost me a hundred dollars.’ He scans Corso’s message, snorts again. Flicks the letter across the table.

We get the standard heritage tour: the shotgun Nagual paintings with demon faces, and the books, which are mostly science fiction, serial killers, UFO reports. Along with unsolicited gifts left, pristine, on the shelf. Burroughs keeps a King James Bible close at hand: ‘for the language’. He re-reads: Hemingway (‘good on death’), Greene, Conrad. Denton Welch above all. And books with hard information.

A large ginger cat is sleeping on her master’s sun-spotted single bed. Outside there is a feline cemetery with headstones, names and dates. Tasty snacks are prepared for the OAs (the outside animals): raccoons, possums, feral cats. Who do not stay outside, but who infiltrate the kitchen. If Bill gets up in the night, numerous rank and furry things press against his thin legs. He rescues wounded rats. And tolerates visits from Dean Ripa, the snake man, who has been known to set a king cobra, a gaboon viper and a fer-de-lance loose in the living room. Sacks of Tidy Cat deodorant powder are required to combat the fetid reek of the cat litter. All of these creatures, like Lawrence itself, like America, are dying. Becoming projections, Ariels and Calibans of the Midwest. ‘Not even a rat left behind,’ Burroughs says. ‘That’s my religion. Read Beckett. You identify and kill alter egos to get to the bottom: the unnameable, the abyss. Silence.’

He set a mirror in the goldfish pond to catch his ally. Weed cataracting a silver eye. Razored cloud-strip bandages. The rain-stick is broken and his magic is done. He pokes his cane among sluggish fish, stirs the leaf-thick muck. And talks about the time drunken Indians came over the fence from the Native American college. Guns are in the basement. There is a feathered wand in the bedroom.

The cats are tapping the old man for psychic sap, milking him, stalking through rubbled dreams of the coming Land of the Dead. On subsequent US visits – to Bastrop in Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona – I learnt about the fellowship of those internal exiles, the hardcore writers: Michael Moorcock, Jim Sallis. Like Burroughs, they kept cats and guns (Mike’s was a replica). Cats infiltrate mystery fiction: men with coffee habits, ex-drinkers, post-traumatic spooks solving crimes the hard way. Moorcock uses cats like a scarf, like Peter Sellers in
The Wrong Box
; their claws scratch runes into his easy chair.

Burroughs measures out his day between methadone hits, calls to the vet, and the ever-earlier hour for that first tumbler of vodka and Coke. Once the slow drinking starts, it doesn’t stop. Early to bed. When he eats – knowing there is nothing on offer in the Land
of the Dead, that border country of extinguished volcanoes and limp-cock sex – he snorts an extra hit of sea salt, like snuff, between every bite. As if he is preparing himself for a return to the sea.

The orgone accumulator looks like an outdoor privy. ‘Watch out for the black widow spiders,’ he says. We pose for the ritual shot. Burroughs slips his left arm around Pavel. With that smooth face, disconnected smile and buzz-cut hair, Coen reminds Bill of a medical orderly. A keeper of liquids. In a few years, Burroughs will fade from the photograph. There will be two strange men standing, yards apart, around a scarecrow absence on a patch of Kansas grass.

Back inside, books inscribed, drinks poured, Burroughs comes to the revelation.
He doesn’t write any more
. He paints, shoots cans. He collects his prescription from Kansas City. The last set worth recording was a landfill dump on the Kaw River, outside Topeka. Debris, cottonwoods, wild turkeys. Burroughs sat, unmoving, through the afternoon. He recognized an opening for his get-out novel,
The Western Lands.
‘Gradually, as he wrote, a disgust for his words accumulated until it choked him and he could no longer bear to look at his words on a piece of paper.’

A sweat-lodge ceremony with a Sioux medicine man revealed, and then exorcized, the ugly spirit that had oppressed him for so many years; a spirit in the form of a winged Vietnam War helmet. A spirit representing the karma of American materialism and invasion guilt. A spirit smelling of chicken-fried steak and napalm. This spirit was the curse laid down at the moment when he shot and killed Joan Vollmer in Mexico City in 1951. A curse that could only be ameliorated by dedicating his life to writing, taking the dictation of the old ones. And now the job was done.

The way was clear to the western lands, a dream cinema without horizons, space that contracts to a single point of light but never ends. ‘I am forced to the appalling conclusion,’ Burroughs said, ‘that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. There is no way out.’

He stared into the abyss and the abyss stared right back. Michael Emerton, a curly-headed carer, boyfriend of James Grauerholz, one of the business managers of the Burroughs estate, shot himself in November 1994. Burroughs was very fond of the boy and made him the dedicatee of
My Education.
With Emerton at the wheel, there had been a high-speed crash in a BMW two months earlier. The driver lost control. The vehicle aquaplaned, bounced off a crash barrier and skidded across the turnpike. Burroughs got out, unscathed, leaning on his cane: ‘I need an ambulance.’

Youths appeared all the time, wanting to see or touch the old man in the red house. Some were taken on to help with domestic duties or to run necessary errands. Most were photographed. Many had adolescent problems or projects to discuss with the junk-fed sage. Quantities of opiates were ingested, regular hits of dope; Kansas evenings softened with vodka and Coke. George Laughead arrived from Dodge City, trailing a high-school senior called Daniel Diaz. The boy’s mother had threatened her son’s life on two occasions.