{"id":66201,"date":"2014-02-05T16:00:02","date_gmt":"2014-02-05T21:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=66201"},"modified":"2014-02-06T08:23:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-06T13:23:00","slug":"lobster-and-vodka-at-chez-burroughs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/02\/05\/lobster-and-vodka-at-chez-burroughs\/","title":{"rendered":"Lobster and Vodka Chez Burroughs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meeting William Burroughs on his eightieth birthday.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"William_S_Burroughs<\/a>

Illustration: Christian Tonnis<\/p><\/div>\n

I have this fairy godmother, a childhood friend of my mother\u2019s who lives in Lawrence, Kansas. My mother and I call her up several times a year and she\u2019s always turning me onto cool stuff. One day, when I was a senior in high school, it occurred to me to ask her,<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you know William S. Burroughs?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

I should emphasize that this moment came at the feverish height of a blind obsession I had with William Burroughs and everything Burroughs related.<\/p>\n

\u201cPersonally?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, sure.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re friends with him?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, we certainly know each other. He\u2019s one of our local characters.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you see a lot of him?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI see him all the time, but mostly in the cat-food aisle of the supermarket.\u201d<\/p>\n

I went straight to my mother and demanded that we visit my godmother at the earliest opportunity. That summer, after I\u2019d graduated high school and had had my wisdom teeth out, we went to Kansas. <\/p>\n

My godmother made it clear that she had no intention of foisting me upon \u201cthe old man,\u201d as she called him, but she did introduce me to one of his close friends, his editor at the time, who also declined to bring me to him, but was happy to tell me stories\u2014such as how Burroughs\u2019s most recent piece of writing had appeared to be utter gibberish until he realized he had to look at the typewriter key to the left of every character on the page, which ultimately revealed a rather mushy love poem to an octopus. (Toward the end of\u00a0Burroughs\u2019s life, cats, lemurs, and other non-humans were very much at the forefront of his thoughts.)<\/p>\n

Although she didn\u2019t feel comfortable trying to set up a meeting on my behalf, my godmother did show me which house was his. It is entirely against my nature to knock on anyone\u2019s door without an express invitation, so instead, I walked back and forth in front of his gate with a collection of bird-call devices I\u2019d found lying around in my godmother\u2019s living room, hoping to coo him out of his domicile. (I imagine I believed this was an effective tactic after having read, in Hammer of the Gods<\/i>, that a depressive Jeff Beck was lured out of his house and abducted for a concert by means of a bagpipe player in a diaper marching to and fro in front of his house.)<\/p>\n

As the sun set, I thought I caught a glimpse of a pair of eyes peering through a bend in the blinds. But that was all I got.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

A few months later, I was twiddling my thumbs in my college dorm room when a hallmate summoned me to the phone. It was my godmother.<\/p>\n

\u201cGuess what\u2019s coming up,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t have to guess. It was to be his eminence\u2019s eightieth birthday in February.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have these dear sweet friends with a wonderful bookstore that I just love to support. They\u2019re organizing a reading celebrating the old man. If you could find a way to come out again and come read at that event, I\u2019m pretty sure I can make sure you get to see him.\u201d<\/p>\n

So back I went to Kansas, brimming with anticipation. I was nervous about the reading, not possessing a very good voice of my own and not being very adept at public speaking. I made a sound collage of reel-to-reel tape manipulations and sampler loops of Ottoman military processions, Moroccan taqtuqa jebeliyya<\/i>, Egyptian tarab<\/i>, and Azeri art music; when I read my selections from Exterminator!<\/i> and The Ticket that Exploded<\/i>, I held a little Walkman with a speaker up to the mic and tried to balance the droning collage with my own delivery. There was a colorful roster of performers, from a local painter, Roger Shimomura, to the science-fiction-writing country singer Melvin Litton, to the two women who ran the store, who were very warm, wholesome types and struggled together with some perplexity through a selection from Naked Lunch<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Then, at last, Burroughs himself hobbled into the store. In the flesh! I was struck by how old and frail he looked. He had but the ghost of a wisp of hair left on his head. Feeling foolish, uncomfortably flushed, and hot, I introduced myself by name. \u201cGlad to know you!\u201d he said, somewhat impersonally. How was he doing? \u201cAs well as might be expected, after this operation I just had on my foot.\u201d He hobbled onward, looked around, and left not long after. A little later, I was speaking with James Grauerholz, who laughed about\u00a0Burroughs\u2019s \u201coperation\u201d: \u201che had a corn removed the other day, but he loves to blow it out of proportion.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the reading, a mapcap turn of events ensued, culminating in a harrowing car chase. For all its genteel arts community and literary luminaries, Lawrence has its bloodthirsty fratboys. But that\u2019s a story for another day.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

The next day, my godmother\u2019s friend came by early in the afternoon and we drove over to Burroughs\u2019s place on Lenard Avenue together. (He actually had two places on Lenard Avenue, but this was his home; the other was for painting pictures and shooting them.) A small group of local men\u2014a thoroughly charming good-old-boy intelligentsia\u2014maintained a regular, perhaps daily, ritual of gathering at Burroughs\u2019s house and whiling away the afternoon hours into the evening, drinking and smoking pot and talking about whatever. These men were all good friends of my godmother\u2014local poets and writers, good-natured and mildly zany with a particularly tornado-alley perspective on things. We walked into the house and there sat Burroughs, in what looked like an oversize rawhide umbrella stroller. Sitting by him were his friend and editor I\u2019d met on my previous visit, and another crony of theirs, a wacky plumber-raconteur-poet who remains a beloved figure about town.<\/p>\n

I was warmly welcomed without ceremony and immediately fixed a vodka and coke. \u201cYou do all this stuff right?\u201d the guy who had brought me over asked, referring to the alcohol and pot. Joint after joint was rolled and burned, and where at first I\u2019d sat silent, starstruck, and unable to believe my good fortune, I was soon positively catatonic. The first time Burroughs addressed me directly, he rose out of his stroller, hobbled right over to me, leaned in, and closed the blinds. \u201cThe neighbors don\u2019t like all this reefer madness,\u201d he said with weary aplomb.<\/p>\n

Four other guests came by over the next hour or two, most or all of them coming from out of town to pay their respects. One was a shaggy, bearded, cowboy-boot-wearing giant. The others seemed to be French\u2014a pair of fashionably dressed, frizzy-haired men, one the younger companion of the other, and a lone traveler who would have fit effortlessly into an \u201cinterzone\u201d milieu; he could\u2019ve been found hanging around the docks at Marseille or something. \u201cWeelyam,\u201d he said, \u201cthe cops around here don\u2019t seem so cool. I was smoking a joint in my car and just after I got stopped and I suddenly felt like frightened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burroughs didn\u2019t say much, except to provide an occasional annotation to one of the lively anecdotes going around: \u201cNo, I think that was down by your place that happened.\u201d I hardly said a word. At one point the burly cowboy-boot guy interrupted a particularly preposterous story with a roar: \u201cLET THE GUEST SPEAK!\u201d Burroughs was startled: \u201cWhat? What? What happened?\u201d Everyone turned to stare at me, but I couldn\u2019t think of a thing to say. I begged them to resume their stream of conviviality.<\/p>\n

Later, Burroughs sipped my drink by mistake\u2014unlike his, mine was less than three-quarters vodka. He choked and flailed until he regained composure. \u201cThis couldn\u2019t be my drink!\u201d he pronounced.<\/p>\n

I gave him a present. It was The Wisdom of Idiots<\/i>, a book by the sort-of pop \u201cSufi\u201d author Idries Shah, which I had wrapped in shiny imitation-gold-leaf Egyptian hieroglyph paper.<\/p>\n

I know precisely the sort of book I had wanted to give him. In today\u2019s era of Internet shopping, I would have located an edition of Nicholson\u2019s translation of Abo\u2019l-Hassan \u2018Ali bin Osman al-Jullabi al-Hujviri\u2019s Kashf al-Mahjoub<\/i>, an in-depth and marvelously entertaining exploration of medieval Islamic mysticism from a Khorasanian persepctive, but in the early nineties, book shopping in Philadelphia was an impoverished enterprise, and The Wisdom of Idiots<\/i> was the best I could come up with. \u201cI like the paper,\u201d he said with genuine approval. He unwrapped it carefully. \u201cAh, idiot savants! A fascinating subject!\u201d he exclaimed. I tried to explain to him the nature of these stories and what I knew of their cultural context. \u201cYes! \u2026 YES! \u2026 \u201d he said, \u201cIdiot savants, know them well!\u201d<\/p>\n

He showed me a book he had laying nearby, a folio of photographs of tornado damage. We leafed through it together, riveted. \u201cCan you imagine?\u201d he said of a piece of hay that had penetrated a brick wall.<\/p>\n

We went to his backyard, where I saw his frozen goldfish pond and his orgone accumulator. He broke the ice over the pond with his cane, in case the fish wanted to do any peeking or leaping, and I went into the orgone box for a fleeting eternity. Back inside, I told Burroughs that I had tried to read The Function of the Orgasm<\/i> and hadn\u2019t understood a word of it, and could he please break it down for me?<\/p>\n

He composed himself. \u201cAhem, well, you see, Wilhelm Reich came to the realization, through extensive trial and error, that\u2014oh! oh! oh my! Did you see that? That cat there! Froofy! He jumped from here\u201d\u2014he tapped the floor with his cane\u2014\u201cto there,\u201d he said, gesturing to the kitchen counter. \u201cCan you imagine a human who could jump six times the length of his body?\u201d There were several instances where his train of thought was interrupted by such occurrences.<\/p>\n

When we returned to the main salon\u2014if I may call it such, since it was but a nondescript, wood-floored Midwestern living room\u2014James Grauerholz had arrived with lobsters, ready to be served. He was slicing a baguette. Burroughs strode over in great distress. \u201cYou can\u2019t cut anything with a knife like that!\u201d he admonished\u2014though it was a large, unquestionably sharp steak knife that Grauerholz was using. Burroughs hastily produced a machete, or something near enough, and insisted on wielding it against the baguette, gripping the handle with both hands and wincing as he thrust the fairly inconsiderable weight of his body into the operation.<\/p>\n

Then he and I sat at a little lamp table and ate our lobster off the same plate, using the same nutcracker. This was a very special moment. I mean, for me.<\/p>\n

After dinner, I called my godmother and asked for a ride. Burroughs became alarmed: \u201cIs someone coming to this house<\/i>?\u201d<\/p>\n

I told him I\u2019d wait for her on the porch. When I\u2019d been out there a few minutes, Burroughs put on his hat and came out and sat next to me, clutching his cane. I asked him if he liked Parliament and Funkadelic.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever heard of them.\u201d It was chilly. \u201cWhere\u2019s this grandmother of yours? Let\u2019s go wait back inside.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few minutes later, my godmother came through the door, fanning a path for herself through the dense clouds of pot smoke. Burroughs looked up at her and his face brightened: \u201cBethie! What are you doing here?\u201d Not only did he know her\u2014he knew her cats. \u201cHow\u2019s Scampers? And Frisky? And Wowsie?\u201d I got up to greet her, wearing a feel-good smirk, and he said, \u201cOh this is your grandmother? Bethie, I didn\u2019t know you had any grandchildren.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wish I had asked her to bring a camera. But now, whenever my overall credibility as a human being comes into question, I have only to reflect on my meeting with William Burroughs to remind myself that I belong to that<\/i> world. It pains me to admit that one of my most memorable days was probably one of his most utterly forgettable, but my mind has surrendered some of the finer points, too. To this day, whenever I tell this story, I always have to improvise all the cats\u2019 names.<\/p>\n

George M\u00fcrer is a filmmaker specializing in the music of Kurdistan, Khorasan, and the Indian Ocean region. He lives in New York and is currently pursuing a PhD in ethnomusicology.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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