"[ 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 émigrés... 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, à 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 ]" "Closed-Captioned by Captions, Inc., Burbank"