[ William S. Burroughs ]
"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 gray 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
care to step this way.
You are about to witness...
"the complete, all-American
deanxietized man."
[ Man Narrating ]
William Seward Burroughs,
heir to the Burroughs
Adding Machine Company
founded by his grandfather,
was born in 1914
in St. 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."
[ John Waters ] 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, the '50s.
It was the most terrible time.
It was the first memory I had,
and it was of you had to be
exactly like everybody else.
The Beat Generation
was crushing that.
It 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.
The Beat Movement...
Well, of course it was.
It underwent many changes.
In the '60s, it became
quite political.
Yeah.
But as I've always said,
it's more sociological
than a literary phenomenon.
It was a sociological movement
of worldwide importance.
Unprecedented
worldwide importance.
A cultural revolution,
you might say.
Yeah.
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 a production of a number
of notable utterances.
Allen Ginsberg's
first publication...
was Howl.
It was published in 1956.
In 1957, Jack Kerouac's
On The Road.
And in 1959, Naked Lunch
by William Burroughs.
These three books came out.
[ Waters ]
Beatniks were big.
Overnight, it was a huge...
Like a hula hoop.
Much to their embarrassment,
I think.
Because it started out pretty
much in North Beach and stuff,
like poets and...
So once it became so big
in the media, they were
embarrassed by that term.
[ Amiri Baraka ]
All of those poets,
they couldn't fit what
the stereotype of Beat was.
That was a media hype
to sell papers.
And they pimped that, boy.
They pimped that bad boy,
really.
[ V. Vale ] Burroughs himself
never identified with
the Beat Generation.
He was the 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 classical education
that he had.
And invented a style of book
almost.
I mean, it was so original.
And anything that's
so original like that,
eventually lasts.
[ Burroughs ]
Cut... Angle... Word line...
This matter... res... the...
ripples... with cortex...
In the vague description...
which an area...
evasion... experience...
will project...
further experience...
when accompanied... of mass...
but limited...
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
assholes and heroin.
He was not easy to like.
[ Ira Silverberg ]
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...
salesman thing that
he'd created. You know.
And 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'd had that worldview
and he was writing in a more
polite way...
and if 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.
Well, certainly not
in our strata.
Or very little that I saw.
There might have been
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 exactly the same way.
"Thanks for the K.K.K."
For nigger-killing lawmen
feeding their notches.
For decent, churchgoing 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 know, 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."
You know, there's so many
phrases, names of groups that
come from William's work.
He's like another kind of Bible.
[ Victor Bockris ]
He's a great pioneer of
the gay liberation movement,
or the whole position,
standing of gay people
around the world really now.
Where'd you learn about sex
originally, from friends?
Books.
Books? Yes.
The book called The Plastic Age
by Percy Marks was sort of
a daring book for the '20s.
Mm-hmm.
And The Green Hat
and Coming of Age in Samoa.
Mm-hmm.
This is the '20s
I'm talking about,
which is a very different era.
[ Bockris ]
Burroughs once said to me,
"If one man stands up
and, you know, rejects..."
the bullshit of society,
"it makes it possible for
everyone else to follow on."
And he was that man
to some extent.
And here is Reverend Braswell
in the Denver Post...
"Homosexuality is
an abomination to 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 book.
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.
You know,
that was just another sort of
amalgalmized effort to, uh...
to not be marginalized.
And he was
one of the very few...
maybe Jean Genet
and maybe Pier Paolo Pasolini...
who had the balls...
way before it was, like, 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 have 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 junkies' worlds.
He opened up to me
not gay culture.
He opened up gay rebels that
couldn't fit in gay culture.
Very different.
And I have to say that
Burroughs to this day
and his work...
have an uneasy, uh,
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.
[ Andy Warhol ]
On this thing right here.
Right here. Here. Go on...
Oh, my God.
[ Bockris ] And I have to take
Burroughs and Warhol
as 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 out front about it.
At that time, that was
absolutely outrageous.
I mean, 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.
And 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.
[ James Grauerholz ]
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 little Billy ran away home
to St. Louis...
and couldn't go back
Los Alamos at all.
Sent off for his diaries.
And as he wrote,
when the box arrived with
the fearful diaries in them,
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.
I mean, his boyfriends
like Jack Anderson,
the one that 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 gonna commit
his life to Bill Burroughs.
So he very much was thinking
of boyfriends as members of
a class different from him.
After I had 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 Richard,
you have this idea
about, uh,
intellectual and social equals
being a couple."
He says, "In my day,
that's just unheard of."
I mean, you know,
it was an interclass thing."
[ Marcus Ewert ]
In the fall of '89,
I met him at his old place...
his old stomping grounds
in the Bowery... the Bunker.
And at that time, I was 18.
I was a freshman in college.
I was already basically
Allen Ginsberg's boyfriend.
Um, but I always 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, I don't...
Not particularly.
Because I don't
remember any...
I don't remember any, um...
any such thing.
Mm-hmm.
How come?
'Cause I was kind of cute.
Looking back
with hindsight.
Well, I don't know.
If it was
like an ordinary
relationship...
in one of his novels,
it was usually
the theme
of, um,
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
like what his writings
were for.
They were love letters
to make the person that
he was interested in laugh.
'Cause they were
almost comedy routines.
[ Genesis Breyer P-Orridge ]
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 that 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?
Mmm, not really.
It depends...
Mm-hmm.
By who or what.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
By my cat, certainly.
Mm-hmm.
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, right?
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."
[ Mutters ]
- "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.
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.
What he was sobbing about is,
he said he'd all of a sudden
been thinking about nuclear war,
and then he was struck with
this horrific thought of,
"What would happen to my cats,
my six cats, if I died?"
And that just wrecked him.
You can just see the cats
were kind of these 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.
And I don't think that meant...
I don't think that...
So like 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 it's not so threatening.
All right.
All right, you two.
I'll get you some food.
[ Continues, Indistinct ]
[ Meows ]
[ Dennis Dailey ]
On one side, he's
this kind of...
loosey-goosey liberal
of his time,
where sexuality is free-spirited
and all that sort of thing.
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.
But, um...
And he has talked about it,
but it's just too deeply buried.
He was never really able
to find out.
[ P-Orridge ]
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, you know, um,
doing something or other
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 that 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.
[ Woman ]
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.
Uh, we traded recipes.
But I would say that
in that world,
particularly if you're,
you know, 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, so...
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 Shafto, '"
And I would sing him
the little song.
Bobby Shafto's gone to sea
Silver buckles on his knee
One fine day he'll marry me
Pretty Bobby Shafto
Ah, 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.
[ Voices, Indistinct ]
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 duchesses of Europe,
and the young migrs...
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 this 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 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.
You know, William
had read a lot in philosophy,
the nature of consciousness
and science and mind travel.
You know, magic,
tantrism, 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.
[ Burroughs ]
That is all, all, all
gossip. Stop it.
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 Walters produced
many of the phenomena...
Anything that
can be done chemically
can be done in other ways"...
[ P-Orridge ]
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 that's 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 different ways.
But no, I think that William
was a very, very political,
radical, anarchist man.
[ Gunshot ]
[ Gunshot ]
[ Regina Weinreich ]
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, if you've got
the Yage Papers...
And 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
C.I.A.'s version of L.S.D.,
L.S.D.-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."
[ Waters ]
William Burroughs,
sure he romanticized drug use,
but not in the way that usually
people think romantic.
I think no one
had written about it.
Nobody had read about it.
It was a hidden,
terrible thing.
So 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 anybody read Naked Lunch
and try heroin? Probably.
So what? That doesn't mean
that book shouldn't be read.
I'm for anybody that shows...
writes about their obsession
and shows...
A murderer can write a book
about how great it is to murder.
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.
And so the whole question
of narcotics, to kind of...
I mean, even with
the fantastic thing
that Burroughs conceived of...
The idea that there
were junkies in America...
[ Chuckles ]
you know, was somewhat
of a social breakthrough.
[ Grauerholz ]
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 who were addicted to it,
they thought it was
the pinnacle of coolness
to go score a bag,
maybe of Dr. 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.
[ John Giorno ] On the street
outside... Rivington and Bowery...
was a big pick-up place.
Junkies for five blocks
going east.
Howard was coming to visit.
He said, "John,
I scored for William."
And they shot up together.
Howard, at that point,
had to be H.I.V.-positive.
But William, having seniority,
shot up first.
William shot up many times.
People came and visited,
and, uh...
But he always
got the first shot,
so he never got AIDS.
I thought that
was pretty great.
I mean, everyone died!
Sadly so.
[ Bockris ] There's always
the question with 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
to not 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.
[ Peter Weller ]
I'm doing this press
conference with Bill.
I said, Bill, you know,
I had this migraine last night.
I came by these pills
in my medicine cabinet,
two Percodans.
And 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, man,
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...
you know,
sex or careerism or cigars...
or whatever that I think
I can get by through,
I can wing this 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 life handed to you
on a toilet seat,
you know, 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.
[ Burroughs ]
It's like ultra...
subject... regulator...
There's a unique...
after morphine...
the metabolic...
dramatic relief from anxiety.
N-ethyltriptamine... alarming
and disagreeable symptoms.
The use of opium
and/or derivatives...
[ Grauerholz ]
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,
uh, to one extent or another,
his whole life.
I mean, when I met him in '74,
he was not taking it,
except just, you know,
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, uh,
enroll in the methadone
maintenance program under...
His physician was named
Dr. Harvey Carcass.
Give me something to shoot!
[ Man Chuckles ]
[ Man 2 ]
It kicks like a mule, babe.
I want something to shoot!
[ Man 1 Chuckling ]
Yaa!
[ Woman, Indistinct ]
This great big mamba-jamba...
was a gift from Hunter Thompson.
[ Clears Throat ]
It's a .454 Casull.
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'd carry, uh, 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.
[ Ewert ]
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 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 in the covers
and my foot hits some bump,
some really hard bump.
And I'm like, um,
"William, what is that?"
And he's like,
"Oh, it's a gun."
And I'm like, um,
"Oh, is that gun loaded?"
And he goes, "Oh, yeah,
always... always keep it loaded."
That way, you never
have to worry about
whether it's loaded or not."
[ Wayne Propst ]
This is a silencer.
This was in William's basement.
Take a .38 and shoot it
in the basement.
There was a target
across the basement.
Upstairs...
this is about what you'd hear.
[ Soft Tap ]
No, a little louder
than that.
[ Louder Tapping ]
That's a gun going off
down in...
And you wouldn't even...
Barely...
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?"
And it was shooting
six rounds of .38's.
I would imagine
he got a feedback, uh,
high out of it, in the sense
that this is better than
shooting heroin.
I mean,
you shot something else,
and it went bang.
[ Fred Aldrich ]
He had a fascination with guns
that was all his own.
I've often wondered
what it sprung from.
Whether it was,
you know, 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.
And he talked about
defending himself.
[ Patricia Elliot Marvin ]
He had all these...
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
on how to take care of that.
[ Chuckles ]
[ Vale ] 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 really.
He had a cane, but he knew
the art of cane fighting.
He'd studied it.
He had a book on it.
And then he had the cobra.
And then he also had
a sharp knife that he
could flick out real fast.
He studied all these arts
of self-defense.
This is a...
[ Dean Ripa ]
In his writing, you see,
he's always pushing himself
to the limits of...
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.
And 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 nonpoisonous 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.'"
[ Ripa ]
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..."
uh, a positive
or negative reply...
"you may consider
the snake in transit."
So...
[ Chuckles ]
So he rapidly responded.
In fact, I had two or three
quick letters...
please begging me not
to send the Gaboon viper.
But I did also get
an invitation to his house.
And in those days, I often
carried snakes around
in suitcases.
So he wanted to see
the snakes feed,
and I think I had
a rattler in there
and a couple 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 it was not
going to get bitten.
So William just blindly,
thoughtlessly reached in
with this hand,
grabbed the mouse, or rat,
to move it into position
that the snake could bite it.
And when he did that,
at that moment,
the snake struck, and I think
it just grazed his hand.
It just brushed his hand,
you know.
So I was very nearly
responsible...
for killing William Burroughs
on that trip...
[ Chuckling ]
when he... when he reached in.
Very brave guy, you know,
but not, you know,
I don't think so cautious
as he should have been.
- It's a magnum?
- [ Man ] Yeah.
[ Man ]
He'd go have some cocktails
with Fred and then come out...
and say, "See? My hand
is really steady now."
[ Man 2 ] Yeah.
Well, a few vodka Cokes
will do that for you.
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 be...
And you think
it's gonna go over.
And then he...
He's gotta fall down.
[ Mutters ]
[ Laughter ]
[ Man, Indistinct ]
Now, William, for a while,
rented this cottage.
And one time, I'm told...
I was out of town...
that he put some bales of hay
up against that stone wall
over there.
I heard about it.
I thought, "Oh, my God.
It's a wonder he's still alive."
The bullets went through
the bales of hay
and came right back.
So Patricia tells the 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
splot on his forehead.
And of course, the first impulse
of whoever was with him...
thought he'd shot himself.
But then they noticed
it wasn't red.
It was black.
Apparently, a piece
of the glass from the bottle
had ricocheted back and hit him.
It's a miracle that he lived
as long as he did...
with all of the things
that he did.
Joan Vollmer was
Edie Kerouac's...
Parker's roommate.
Everybody thought that 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.
And 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,
la 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
who began also...
It's a toy.
He's playing William Tell
with a .45, for God's sakes.
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 it off
and missed.
I mean, it's hideous.
It's like a comedy sketch
almost though.
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...
and not seeing it as,
you know, an act of...
complete carelessness
and violence...
or that there was some
strange, dark underpinning.
But clearly, some energy
was out of control.
[ Narrator ]
The accident left their
two children without a mother.
Julie... Joan's daughter
from her 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,
"I 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've meant that
would have been...
remorse was hubristic.
To even entertain remorse
was-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,
like, 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 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.
You know, William
was very tough.
He'd cry for 10 seconds.
And then continued walking
along those winding streets
in old Mexico.
And it happened
three or four times.
He was walking to meet Joan
at 5:00 in that bar,
and he didn't know
why he was crying.
And only after,
when she was dead,
he remembers this.
And the idea is that
you put your mind...
It's a synchronicity
or whatever that your mind...
foresees or sees this thing
that's happening
in the immediate future...
and you're reacting to it,
you're weeping for
the horror of it.
[ Man Vocalizing ]
I have constrained myself...
I have constrained myself...
to the realization that...
[ Patti Smith ]
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 it.
And all of a sudden,
I just went off.
It's like my tongue was tied,
and I just started
babbling a bit.
I miscalculated.
It was just a few minutes
or a few...
just microseconds...
just...
And when I finished,
everybody was...
You know, it was mo...
just a split second
of total silence...
'cause it was sort of
a heavy moment.
And then I finished.
[ Applause,
Cheering ]
And afterwards,
I went up to William.
I didn't know whether
to apologize or...
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...
You know, 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 be from William himself...
um, helped to set that at rest.
The negativity of that karma
propelled him to be a writer.
He had to, you know,
fight his way out of
a black paper bag...
It was becoming a writer...
Of the negative karma
that he...
'Cause he loved Joan.
He's a gay man,
but he had a wife
and he loved her.
They had many... a great...
a great life together.
And it was
a great tragedy for him.
[ Laurie Anderson ]
I don't think that 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.
Now, 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.
You know, Burroughs is a fairly
foreboding character
in his novels.
It's like, um...
I find Burroughs to be
hilariously funny.
Some people are like,
"Oh, God. Naked Lunch.
It's obscene.
All these guys getting hung.
All this jissom.
All this disgusting"...
You know.
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, um,
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.
[ Weinreich ]
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's
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 had indeed
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 books.
It was thinking up something
that wasn't even illegal yet.
And that book
was so passionate.
And in the beginning,
you can't have a better
press agent than a censor,
especially in the '50s and '60s.
This is William speaking
and 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
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."
"A man is carried in naked
by two Negro bearers..."
who dropped him
on the platform...
with bestial,
sneering brutality.
The man wriggles.
His flesh turns to viscid,
transparent jelly...
that drips away
in green mist"...
[ David Cronenberg ]
I think Burroughs's writings,
particularly Naked Lunch,
were quite revolutionary.
They talked about things
that nobody talked about,
especially in America,
which was very...
I'd say rather more
sexually repressed than...
Because of the Puritan
traditions of America
and so on.
He really... It wasn't
just homosexuality.
I mean, it was just
his alien sexuality.
[ Burroughs ]
In the '60s,
it became quite political,
with the yippies.
They had a very
definite program.
And most of those objectives
were realized.
Mm-hmm.
End the Vietnam war.
Uh, legalization of pot.
Uh, end of censorship.
Uh, recognition
of minority rights.
Mm-hmm.
Most of those objectives,
as least to some extent.
[ Chanting, Shouting ]
[ Bockris ]
When Bill witnessed an event
such as that, he wrote about it.
And what you get in the writing
is what he saw.
He said all the obvious things,
you know.
It was a fascist state.
It was, uh...
It was frightening.
In Grant Park, when
the police were approaching,
he wondered if he'd be able
to withstand it...
of 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.
After all, most people
were kids,
and he was, like,
in his late 50s
at that point.
[ People Chattering ]
[ Man ]
I gotta go be with them
on Saturday night...
for a family party on Sunday.
[ Man ]
I think of changing things.
Hare Krishna.
[ Waters ]
Alan Ginsberg
was more of a hippie.
Hippies always got on my nerves.
We were punks without
knowing we were punks.
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.
[ Bockris ]
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,
"punk" was a very good
word to use.
[ Grunts ]
[ Raucous ]
[ Van Sant ]
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.
[ Bockris ]
Don't forget, he had that
column, "Time of the Assassins",
in Crawdadd 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 Junkie,
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 everyone...
that William Burroughs
was back in town.
"Isn't that great?
Welcome to New York,
William Burroughs!"
[ Chattering ]
William, I was just
in Amsterdam,
and I haven't
played in Amsterdam
since we were there.
[ Chattering ]
[ Strumming: Ballad ]
He would read in Max's,
and Patti Smith would
read or else sing.
And it was like
the early punk movement,
and he was connected to that.
[ Smith ]
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.
[ Smith ]
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,
you know, with sores...
and scarlet fever, visions.
And just the whole
movement of Johnny,
you know, in the Wild Boys.
And my first album, Horses,
is littered with
Burroughs-type references.
[ Vale ] 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, say,
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, "The English rock group
the Sex Pistols..."
wrote a song called
'God Save the Queen.'"
I think he commended it.
He says, "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!"
The whole audience
was starting to join in.
Every time he said it,
they were, "Bugger the Queen!"
We went to his house
a couple times and hung out,
shot Super 8 film
and photos and whatnot...
and just kind of hung out
with William a little bit.
[ Thurston Moore ]
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
was what it looked like.
It was 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 they have...
something to do with him feeling
like 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 bullshit.
It mostly is, you know.
But then, so are most novels.
So, you know...
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, 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 an 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.
Typhoid Mary, she got soul
Sucks all night
on an old asshole
She shoots speed
right up her ass
She shoots speed
and she smokes grass
It's a good vocal.
You should hear it some time.
[ Mock Screeching ]
It's particularly...
I can't even get the words out.
[ Lee Ranaldo ]
Certainly someone like Dylan
took a lot of inspiration,
as a wordsmith, from stuff that
Allen and William were doing,
in the way they were
approaching language
and what they were writing...
you know, a very sort of modern
approach to just language...
and using it to uncover
a different truth.
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.
I am no one
but I'm well known
For I am the man
with the dogs
I stare at you shopping,
watch while you're walking
Two dogs run around
your toes
You turn around
Two eyes break you down
Now, who does that guy
think he's starin' at?
Stop in your tracks
You're bein' laughed at
Your armored ego is nude
And I do, and I do
Crack up 'cause
I'm gettin' to you...
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.'"
[ Bockris ] 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.
[ Murmurs, Chuckles ]
Uh, well...
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.
[ Burroughs Singing In German ]
[ Rifle Cocks ]
[ Gunshot ]
[ John Giorno ]
It's not so easy just to...
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.
[ Aldrich ]
We had been shooting out here
for several years.
And one day, William
and the people that would
drive him out there showed up.
And they had some cans
of spray paint.
So they took the cans
of spray paint...
and they suspended them
in front of the plywood.
And William started
blasting the spray paint
over the plywood.
And that was the start,
at least to my knowledge,
of the shotgun art.
[ Gunshot ]
[ Anderson ]
In my own feelings about guns...
over-the-top,
fake macho stuff.
It didn't have, for me,
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.
[ Man ] You mentioned your art.
Is it still the shotgun art,
or is it...
[ Burroughs ]
[ Man ]
Perfect.
That was a good one.
[ Aldrich ]
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,"
'cause, you know, his drink
is vodka and Coke.
And so, after we had
the little soiree,
they took us up
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, $7,000 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."
[ Waters ]
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 good father? No.
[ Narrator ] Billy Burroughs Jr.
had little contact
with his father,
whom he tried to emulate.
His 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.
[ Giorno ] 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 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 ever 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 we talked a little,
and then he went into
the 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.
Which way do you want
to go back?
[ Indistinct ]
[ Grauerholz ]
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.
Oh, this layout...
Expensive layout.
Look at that place.
A pig.
[ Grant Hart ]
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,
gray men with canes,
fighting off
young would-be attackers,
But he was vulnerable, and...
An old man with a cane is...
just as weak as an old man
without a cane.
I'm on the way
to the cemetery myself.
[ Man, Chuckles ]
I bought a plot
yesterday, man.
[ Woman On Microphone ]
What's your personal belief
on death?
Personal belief on death.
- [ Burroughs ] Well, um, hmm.
- [ Audience Chuckles ]
[ Woman ] I was just going
to say, those monsters are
projections of your own mind.
Exactly. Exactly, yes.
Not external.
He certainly became
much more...
explicitly lovable, you know,
in his final year.
Gentle and sweet tempered.
Not that he was so cantankerous
and difficult before, but he...
There was a transformation.
- [ Acoustic Guitar ]
- [ Patti Smith Singing,
Indistinct ]
[ Waldman ] I talked to William
when Allen died,
and it was incredibly hard.
And he, you know, died
just months later.
It was as if there was some...
Well, with both of them,
these sparks went out
of the world.
[ Patti Smith ] Not here
But near
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'd 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 God."
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.
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
you want to do it,
and you know that
you're gonna 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.
[ Acoustic Guitar ]
[ Patti Smith ]
Ours is just another skin
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 goin' nowhere
You can count every one
Until it crashes
unto the earth
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 singin'
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
Ooh, ooh, ooh
[ Ends ]
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