January 2015 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the famed Massachusetts obscenity trial in which the once-scandalous novel "Naked Lunch" by Beat writer William S. Burroughs was ultimately deemed safe enough for the good people of Boston to read. The anniversary makes me recall the occasion I had dinner with once-notorious author when he was 63 and I was 20. It was one of those simple encounters that probably meant little him but wound up meeting a lot to me. And it was entirely legal.
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| Photograph by Richard Avedon. |
It happened in 1977, during the spring of my third year at the State University of New York at Purchase. A classmate of mine from the English Department slipped into the seat next to me in the cafeteria during lunch and said in her best conspiratorial film noir voice, "Hey, William Burroughs is going to be giving a reading from "Naked Lunch" on campus tonight -- my friend Katie's having him over to her apartment for dinner beforehand. Want to come?"
I instantly said yes, though to be honest I had never read any of Burroughs's work, though I was famiar with his notorious reputation, and in fact that very week had read an interview in the "Village Voice" between him and Tennessee Williams, which piqued my interest even more. So right after lunch I took the bus into nearby White Plains and scoured the two or three bookshops there for any Burroughs books. I found a used Grove Press paperback of "Naked Lunch" and headed back to campus, but there was no time to read it -- I had to be at Katy’s campus apartment for that early dinner. When I arrived at the apartment there were a handful of other students already there. Katie was in the tiny kitchen preparing dinner. There was a smell of quiche in the air.
I’ve never been fond of quiche, but I was willing to take one for the team in order to meet Burroughs. He hadn't shown up yet and a couple of the guys were watching a baseball game on the TV in the living room. "Turn that thing off, he's coming up the steps!" someone hissed. The TV was duly flicked off and I heard the doorbell ring, followed by a voice that was low and gruff, but with a certain elegance of diction, saying, "Got anything to drink?"
Before he'd even entered the room, our hostess brightly said, "We have a really excellent bottle of wine..."
"No, I mean the hard stuff. Scotch, whisky."
Katie turned from the door and rushed into the living room, panic-stricken. She grabbed one of the guys and frantically told him, "He wants real the hard stuff, go out and find someone on the block who's got Scotch or something like that.”
The designated booze-hunter scooted out the door as Burroughs walked in. He wore a gray three-piece suit and carried a briefcase and looked for all the world like at cross between the vice-president of a small Midwestern bank and a rather large lizard languidly sunning himself on a rock. He was followed by a much younger male companion who was wearing a beige jumpsuit and resembled a young David Bowie Burroughs sat on the cheap student sofa across from me and Bowie sat on the floor in the corner in a kind of yoga position.
Nobody knew what to say -- what can you say to a legend? -- but fortunately the bottle of Scotch arrived with admirable speed. Someone fetched a tall glass from the kitchen and brought it to Burroughs; he filled the glass to the top and he polished it off neat in one long swig. I was astonished.
Nobody else but Burroughs drank the Scotch -- that was his bottle. The quiche was handed out on paper plates which we balanced on our knees as we attempted some small talk. Our thoughtful hostess tried to bring Bowie into the conversation by asking,
"So, um, what do you do?"
He suddenly looked up and said, "Oh! I write," then went back into sleep mode.
Someone asked Burroughs what he was working on. "Oh, this movie script, but I can't seem to get it right,” he said.
Since I was then studying in the school's Film Department, I saw a conversational opportunity.
"But why be so Hollywooden old-fashioned and start with a script?" I said. "Why not be just as experimental with film as you are in your books" -- none of which I'd actually read --" and improvise as you go along, letting the images tell the story....or do without a story entirely?"
Burroughs looked at me as if he was that Midwestern banker whom I'd just asked for a large loan with zero collateral. "No, no, no" he growled, "you gotta have a script, you gotta have a story, the producers won't give you any money without a script, don't you know anything!" At that time I was unaware that years earlier Burroughs had indeed made some very avant-garde films of the kind I was talking about; perhaps he now wanted to play with the big boys.
More desultory small talk ensued, and finally someone had the temerity to ask Burroughs "how" he wrote "Naked Lunch." The Scotch must have loosened him up, because he launched into an absorbing account of how he'd written mountains of material over many years -- stories, sketches, anecdotes, hallucinations he'd had while stoned -- but never knew what to do with them. Then, sometime in the late Fifties, Allen Ginsberg told Burroughs he could get him a book deal if he had a manuscript ready in about a week or so.
"A week!" Burroughs said. "I've got thousands of pages in no particular order and you want me to assemble them into a book in a week!"
Ginsberg had said, "Yes, Bill -- I know you can do it."
So Burroughs set about stitching all those disparate prose and out of it emerged "Naked Lunch." The very book Burroughs was now going to read from in a few minutes before a packed crowd in the Neuberger Museum (also built of brown bricks). I couldn’t help but wonder if the book would be as dour as the man himself.
Dinner completed, we headed out the door where it was just starting to get dark. As we walked along the path to the museum, I gamely peppered Burroughs with questions: "Mr. Burroughs, I read that interview Tennessee Williams did with you in the "Voice" this week. It was all talk about drugs. Don't writers of the stature of you and Williams have anything else to talk about?" Yes, I was that jejune then.
Burroughs glowered at me as we walked. "Of course we did! We talked for nearly six hours about everything you can imagine! The editors chose to print just the drug stuff. Don't you know how newspapers work?"
I gulped and acknowledged my increasingly apparent ignorance. But I tried again. 'Mr. Burroughs, I read you live down on the Bowery. Isn't that kind of...uh, dangerous?"
He shook his head. "Nah, it's just a lot of bums and winos. They're harmless.”
My education complete, we entered the building. Every seat was taken, standing room only. I suddenly remembered the copy of "Naked Lunch" I had in my bag. I asked Burroughs to sign it and he wrote on the title page above the title, "For Robert," and underneath the title, in his scraggly signature, "William S. Burroughs."
I couldn't find a seat, but what the hell -- I'd had the best seat in the house just twenty minutes ago. I crouched in an aisle as Burroughs read some of the wildest, funniest passages from "Naked Lunch," doing all the voices -- Dr. Benway, AJ, Clem, O’Brien -- emerging from his Midwestern banker demeanor as an actor of considerable gifts and acute comic timing:
“Get me a new scalpel; this one's got no edge to it!”
He thrusts a red fist at her. The doctor reels back and flattens against the wall, a bloody scalpel clutched in one hand. The patient slides off the operating table spilling intestines across the floor.
Dr. Benway sweeps instruments, cocaine and morphine into his satchel.
“Sew her up, I can't be expected to work under such conditions!”
Afterwards, Burroughs took some questions from the audience. I only recall one (and I wasn‘t the person who asked it): "Mr. Burroughs, a friend of mine is seriously thinking of getting into heroin. What would you advise them?"
I was sure Burroughs would give a withering reply, but he just calmly said, "I can't tell anyone whether to use or not use junk. It's his life, he has to make his own decisions."
That seemed to wrap up the evening. The crowd dispersed. I headed to my oppressively silent dorm room,, sat at the desk, and began to read the first pages of "Naked Lunch." The tone of the book immediately cut through me like an icy cold knife, the blade dipped in an arctic nihilism that was no pose but the real thing. This guy really means it. Yet as I read on, that knife turned out to be not the lethal scalpel of Dr. Benway, but one that cut away the polite conventions and banalities of everyday life to release an oddly healing balm of unbridled, utterly anarchic laughter. Suddenly my room,, empty except for me, was filled with the raucous voices of Burroughs’ uniquely carnivalesque paranoid imagination. For the first time I became conscious of the enormous gulf between a person’s outward appearance and the astonishing stuff that might go on in their mind.
The next day I heard that some of the guys from the dinner had gotten into a car with Burroughs and smoked some pot on the way to the Hilltop Bar, where they drank and told stories into the night.
And I'd missed it. I'd never used any kind of drugs during my three years at the college...but I think I might have smoked a joint so I'd be able to say years later, "I got high with William S. Burroughs." It would have made a hell of a story.
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