When I Was Cool (5 page)

Burroughs asked me to hang Billy's overcoat up in the closet. I did. I was happy to get away from their father-and-son reunion. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to discover that there was a pistol in Billy's coat pocket.

I closed the door and went back to the table. Burroughs asked his son if he had been to see Dr. Shringwaym. “He was a CIA man at one time,” Burroughs said. “He worked in the pickle factory. So telephone with restraint, Bill. Watch what you say over the phone—remember, the cucumbers are listening in.”

I got it. It was beginning to sink in, like a foreign language. If the CIA was “the pickle factory,” and pickles are made from cucumbers…

I didn't know why Burroughs wanted Billy to call Dr. Shringwaym, or even who Dr. Shringwaym was. Allen then turned to me and asked if I would call the doctor for Billy.

I said that I didn't think the doctor would tell me anything about another patient.

“He's not that kind of doctor,” Burroughs said. “He performs psychic surgery.” It was the first time that night that Burroughs addressed me directly.

“Go up and call now,” Anne said from the other side of the table, her silver bracelets tinkling as she flipped her long dark hair over her shoulder.

“Obey Death. Blind Death,” Burroughs chanted as I went up the stairs to Allen's telephone in the bedroom. My lungs felt like all the air had been pressed out of them. How dangerous will this phone call be? Was he really a CIA operative? Dangerous to whom?

I had never been upstairs before. I felt like the only one left on a deserted space station, the one non-astronaut, the scientist who goes up with the pilots to study plant life on Mars but who now has to steer the ship, alone.

As I climbed the stairs, I listened in on the grown-ups—that's how it felt to me—talking quietly downstairs. I could hear parts of their conversation drifting up the stairs. I heard Burroughs raise his voice: “Remember Dutch Schultz's last words!”

“What's that?” I shouted through the walls of the space station, relieved that I was still connected to the mother ship. “What were his last words?”

“I don't want harmony. I want harmony.” I heard Anne Waldman's laughter. It made me feel stupid. I had no idea what they were talking about.

I dialed and a voice at the other end answered.

“Dr. Shringwaym,” I said. “I'm calling for Billy Burroughs. I'm supposed to tell you—it's time.”

4. Billy the Kid

William Burroughs was starting to remind me of Dr. Moreau—you know who I mean, the evil scientist who has his own island and conducts weird science on it, like the making of a half panther, half woman who wants to escape with the hero who finds himself stuck there. Like Dr. Moreau, Burroughs conducted weird experiments in his apartment. Dr. Moreau had a half man, half dog valet, and Burroughs had a young assistant who called himself Jubal. He was from a long line of Southern generals, going back to the Confederacy. Including one, Jubal told me, who shot his own men occasionally for slacking off. He was about twenty-five years old and wore expensive, tailor-made suits. He and his master wrote stories together,
High Noon–
type Westerns that climaxed in fantastic shoot-outs, with great carnage on both sides. When I was introduced to Burroughs he was obsessed with two things—
extraterrestrial life and the shoot-out at the OK Corral.
Westworld,
which had opened that summer, was his favorite movie.

 

Billy had to go see the surgeon. His Irish friends, the Westies, were going to pick Billy the Kid up and drive him into Denver for his date with Dr. Shringwaym. Billy's surgeon gave him an evening appointment, which I thought was pretty strange. Like Freud, the doctor would see him in his “consulting room,” which was attached to his house in a suburban part of Denver.

I made that appointment for him, I thought proudly to myself. Since I was terrified of taking drugs, serving the Beats was my “Henry” and my “Charly.” Burroughs taught me that: names for heroin and cocaine. At first I couldn't keep the names straight, until I found a mnemonic method that seemed to work. I was a slow learner. But I was soaking up Beat knowledge like a sponge—a sponge off the coast of South America.

 

I didn't go into Denver very often. I wondered how much thought had gone into establishing the Jack Kerouac School just an hour or so away from Laramie Street and the once-upon-a-time hobo jungles of Denver, where Neal Cassady's father drank and itinerantly practiced his barber trade. “A real Sweeney Todd,” is how Burroughs described Neal's father. As it turned out, it was Trungpa, not the Beats, who had settled on Boulder, because the dark mountains reminded him not so much of Tibet but of Elsinore Castle and the mountains of Scotland, where he had gone to establish one of the first meditation retreats for practitioners of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

It was while driving his sports car in Scotland that Rinpoche crashed into the window of a shop and nearly killed himself. He had crashed into a joke-and-magic shop. The accident paralyzed him on the left side. Whenever he entered a room (usually wearing a beautiful silk suit that shimmered like mermaid skin) Rinpoche
carried his arm as if it were in an invisible sling, his palsied hand held in front of his solar plexus. Someone always helped him to get dressed. He loved jewelry and he always wore a Rolex watch. I could see it on his wrist, even from the back of the auditorium, when he gave his public talks. He had a lovely moon face with dark-rimmed glasses, and he spoke in a high whisper, which always made me think that somehow his vocal cords might have been damaged in the car crash. He always began by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen,” and he was always two or three hours late for his talks.

Rinpoche's talks always made people laugh. Like any prince, he loved his own jokes. My teachers—Anne, Allen, Burroughs—all adored Rinpoche. They said he was enlightened. They liked to tell stories about how drunk he would get on sake during dinner, before his lectures. There was always talk of his court, of the women he liked to have around him. In fact, I would soon discover that one problem with having a girlfriend who was a Buddhist at Naropa was that, if she was really attractive, Rinpoche might ask to see her and then, well…no self-respecting student of Rinpoche's would turn him down. So don't even bother asking her to choose. I would later come to know about this form of suffering.

Joan Burroughs, William's wife, was a legend by the time I came to Boulder. She had been dead a long time. So long, in fact, that Burroughs had become one of the most famous and outspoken homosexuals of his time, his brief, heterosexual life long forgotten. But there was a time when William Burroughs had become a father, although he didn't seem like one now. He and Joan had slept together, at least once, in a motel in Times Square, and Joan had become pregnant with Billy Jr.

After I had worked for Allen for a couple of weeks, he trusted me enough to let me work not just on the verse that would go into his
Collected Poems,
but on the extensive, ongoing files he loved to keep. This man who hated the CIA and the FBI to the point of obsession kept files on everyone he knew. I saw his file for Billy—“William Burroughs III.” He was born on July 21, 1947. I read how
Joan, in a very calm voice, had told her husband that it was probably time to go to a hospital and have her baby. They got into Burroughs's jeep, driving off their farm in Texas to find the nearest hospital. It was not close by. Joan knew that she could never breast-feed the baby, as her breast milk was laced with amphetamines from the inhalers she refused to stop using during her pregnancy. Doing the dishes after dinner one night in Allen's apartment, he told me about the “Birthday Ode” he had written to Billy, and how after he was born he hoped that Billy would be more of a brother to him than his own, rather straight-laced brother, Eugene, was. But it didn't happen that way. Billy was too wretched, too sad, to make Allen feel any brighter about his own life. After Joan had given birth she would put the baby on the porch for her husband to hold while she would check herself for “worm-like filaments,” the first symptoms, as Burroughs had described for her, of postnuclear contamination.

Billy Burroughs was born a drug addict, according to Allen's file, and spent his “first days on earth in withdrawal.” The first time I met him I just saw a sad and quiet young man.

After a week at Naropa, Allen asked me to keep an eye on Billy, who had been diagnosed with a cirrhotic liver, due to his heavy alcohol intake. It was one of my new tasks, to try to keep him away from the bottle, and to keep his Irish gang members from supplying him with booze.

By then I had moved into a nicer apartment in a nearby complex where many University of Colorado students lived. It had a swimming pool, which I never used, but sometimes I sat by the pool dressed in long black pants and a black turtleneck sweater. I had never liked leisure clothes, but I preferred living in the slightly more upscale Canyon Street apartments, as opposed to the student apartments on Broadway. And maybe I needed the added distance from Allen and Peter.

One evening, Billy came by my new apartment and we sat and watched TV. He was drinking straight out of the bottle and smoking a lot of tobacco and marijuana. I knew it was part of my job as
an apprentice to keep him from drinking, but I was too shy to say anything about it.

Billy told me that in a couple of days he was going to go up into the mountains of Boulder where he and his father were growing marijuana in a hidden spot. He explained that Burroughs had told him, “Maryjane can grow in dry soil. The thing to do is cultivate a few other crops as a kind of beard.” Burroughs had turned his apartment into a chemistry lab, developing weed concentrates. (He was also developing tape-recording experiments to investigate life on other planets. “Not on the planets themselves,” Burroughs explained, “but between planets. In the space, the distance between planets, that's where the life, though not as we know it, would be.”)

“I'll take you up there sometime,” Billy said between swigs of Bombay gin. “You can help me cultivate the crop, we'll need help harvesting. We do it only at night, under a full moon. Harvest moon, like the Neil Young song.” He laughed, and then he started to fall asleep in front of the television set. Suddenly, Billy sat upright on the couch, in a mood to talk.

“My father never said anything to me about his life,” Billy announced. “I learned it all from other people. He refuses to talk about anything real. He cultivates speaking to me in the clichés of parenthood. Things about being on the right track, and advice about how to drive around armadillos when it's late at night on the highway to Denver. Practical advice. He would play Hungarian waltzes and watch me, unblinking, for hours. I would ask him what he was thinking and he would tell me that he was trying to imagine what was going through Lincoln's brain when he was shot.”

“A bullet?” I said.

Billy laughed. For the first and only time, I saw him laugh. But that same night I saw him cry. We were watching the James Cagney movie
Angels With Dirty Faces.
In the movie, Cagney pretends to lose his cool on the way to the electric chair, so that the Dead End Kids who look up to him will see him as a coward and reject a life of crime. Billy was a kind of sweaty, unhappy, dead-end kid. I could imagine him reading the morning paper with the headline “Rocky
Dies Yellow.” But as we watched the movie, Billy couldn't stand it when Rocky started screaming his head off on the way to the hot squat.

Suddenly, he jumped up off the couch and ran out of my apartment and into the street. The cars go very quickly up and down the Canyon Street hill, and late at night you can't see anyone crossing the road. I knew Billy could be hit like one of those armadillos on the drive into Denver. And he was my responsibility!

I ran out after him, into the dark Boulder night.

Allen was walking Bill and Anne back to their apartments, and they saw the whole thing: Billy running like a crazed man into the street with me chasing him in hot pursuit. Anne looked at me. Her look said, You can't take care of him, can you? I didn't think you could. She put her arm around Billy, who was by now lying in the street, and she easily led him away. Burroughs watched impassively and never said a word about seeing his son curled up like a fetus in the middle of the road. Allen thought I looked like I was going to pass out. I was.

“What did you say to him?” Burroughs asked me. “What caused him to act so irrationally?”

“He's very shy,” Allen said to Burroughs, defending me. “I don't think he's right for telling Billy what to do.”

“I should get him analyzed,” Burroughs said. “Oh, damn. I'll do it myself.”

“We were watching James Cagney on television,” I tried to explain. “And on Cagney's way to the electric chair, Billy just ran outside!” My answer seemed only to make things worse, to deepen the impression that I wasn't up to the job.

“I knew little Jimmy Cagney,” Burroughs said, ignoring my explanation. “He's queer. Buggered very selectively in Hollywood.” And then he walked away, Allen skipping to keep up, even though Burroughs walked with a cane and looked like he carried his head under his arm, Ichabod Crane–style. I slunk back upstairs to my small, one-bedroom apartment.

My living room now looked like it belonged on the Bowery:
empty Bombay gin bottles (with its portrait of Queen Victoria in a cameo on the label), cigarette stubs and ashes over every surface, and a tumescent, silver-domed Jiffy-Pop still sitting on the stove. Billy had run out before we could cut it open. He loved popcorn. I cleaned up a little. My heart was still racing. You could see the mountains from the tiny balcony at the back of my apartment. Where was the Burroughs family marijuana farm? What did they do with it all? Was the “psychic surgeon” some kind of code? Was it all in some Greyhound locker in Denver? They had all gone to the Neal Cassady School of Business. Would I soon be at the wheel, hauling a trunkful of weed for the Burroughses? “Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.” Indeed.

The next day, Billy canceled his appointment with Dr. Shringwaym.