American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (15 page)

The trapped poet, chased by the tape machine, breaks from his cougar pacing to explain. ‘Four blessed children by four different mothers. And very rich mothers. How blessed I am. I don’t have to
go to work, I don’t have to do anything. I’m happy, I see them. They see me. Oh boy! Great ladies. They wanted to raise their kids alone. One child is enough, Gregory. Sharp women, blessed. Each one, five years a shot. Dig it? No accident.’ But now, he says, things are different. ‘I need my drinky poo. The ball game is over. I don’t want to make more children. I don’t go after women any more.’

We get into an animated discussion on the relative merits of the terms ‘whack’ or ‘dust’ for a Mafia hit. Corso finds ‘whack’ an onomatopoeic vulgarity – the sound is there, but the impact is too crude. He prefers ‘dust’, with the visual scoring of powder rising from old suits, the blue meat of the wasted man returning to clay. Hearing that we are about to visit Burroughs, he tells us that we’ll have good hunting, and terminates the interview to write Bill a letter.

In our rambling stop-start dialogue, Corso uses a number of similes drawn from Native American life, an unconscious reconnection with Snyder’s concerns. The Beats, Gregory implies, are the Redskins of America: noble savages doomed in all they attempt. Or
Hollywood B-feature braves played by Jews. In his collection
Elegiac Feelings American
, he wrote of Kerouac and his identification with the land. He offered up a ‘Spontaneous Requiem for the American Indian’. He saw the metamorphosis of a ‘hard nickel faced’ Apache Geronimo into a leather-jacket motorcyclist: ‘smoking a cigarette in a fishy corner in the night’.

Too many lives, as Kerouac said, are ‘written on mirrors in smoke’. ‘Am I dead or alive?’ John Wieners wondered. ‘A feeling of embalming fluid. This is a cheated poet, a chastised citizen who has gotten hepatitis from Herbert Huncke’s spike.’

When we take our leave of Corso, his minders ask after first editions of the authors they’d like to feature in the shop: Larkin, Barbara Pym. The masque of England the veteran Beats enthuse over – P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Peter Ackroyd – is as much a surprise to me as my fondness for Wieners, Lew Welch and Ed Dorn is to them. We are both chasing, in our ignorance, compensatory stereotypes of difference.

Risking another humiliation from the baggage handlers in torpedo coats, we take a cab to the Paramount Hotel. From the high window, I can see eels of black smoke, but no stars. This is not a good space in which to prepare for William Burroughs. But now I have Corso’s letter in my pocket. There are quilted headboard panels behind the bed, so slippery you don’t want to lean against them. The TV is hidden inside a thin cupboard with a cut-out Osiris eye. Light, spilling from a surgical tube, is so feeble that it’s almost impossible to see the numbers on the telephone. I can’t read my copy of
Ghost of Chance.
But the laminated hardcover book is illustrated by monochrome reproductions of late-Burroughs paintings. In the gloom I imagine lizards staring out of a barbed-wire jungle. I think the elegant black lady from Broadway, the one with the leather coat and fur collar, would feel right at home.

‘The further west you go, the worse it gets,’ Burroughs says. ‘I was born in St Louis. So was Eliot. Place is of no importance. I’ve spent my life looking for a better vintage of boredom. A third of my material comes from dreams, from no place at all.’

Flights are dreams. Anna saw herself levitating over these arid plains and blamed it on my book. ‘What are you working on?’ She dreams for me, and always has. But she has not woken up screaming for years. Circling over the pulsing lights of Kansas City, 1845 hrs, Sunday 20 November 1995, I have never been further away from her. The middle of a vast unconquered landmass.

Very quickly – processing is swift on internal flights before 9/11 – we are in the Hertz Redi-Car lot and I’m adjusting to a left-hand-drive automatic that is unnervingly clean, plastic-smelling and solid. My task, as freeways ravel into a blizzard of signage, is to locate the Sheraton Country Plaza at 770 West 47th Street. Pavel, I discover, is not map literate. He can’t do folds and numbers. He’s engrossed in paperwork from Jim McCrary at William Burroughs Communications. Our instructions for arrival at the Burroughs hideaway in Lawrence. The phone number is unlisted.

Nobody told Pavel that there were two Kansas Cities, at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers. He took us into the wrong one, the jazz one, the lived-in place of working Sunday-night bars. I go into one of these, anticipating frontier saloon-movie treatment – piano stopped, glasses frozen midway to mouth – but they were friendly, amused, and set me on the right road. To another swoop of luggage grabbers, parking jockeys confiscating keys. My room, with its cattle-king bed and cinema-sized TV, is like an exploded Premier Inn or mega-ibis. And I’m comfortable with that. I flick through the channels before we go out for dinner. The only
available news is English: extracts of Princess Di’s simpering confession and clips of Paul McCartney, with his compulsive wink, peddling a Beatles remix. We couldn’t set foot outside the hotel in New York without searchlights sweeping the heavens with news of James Bond and
GoldenEye
at Radio City Music Hall. Impossible to eat a bread roll within a mile of Broadway without one of the waiters bursting into a song from
Cats.
Eliot should never have left St Louis. Burroughs should never have returned.

The constipation of mid-continental wealth is in the spread of beef on our jumbo plates in the restaurant on the Country Club Plaza. Steaks, oozing blood, are relief maps of Missouri, three inches thick, with river systems, historic battle sites, and probably an imprint of the face of Judy Garland in
Wizard of Oz
braids. Single glasses of wine are worth half a bottle elsewhere. To order anything beyond that marks you out as an alcoholic. Patrons are semantically smart in ice-blue suits and fat ties, apart from the ones with Stetsons and gambler’s string held in place with a steer’s head clasp. The muzak is ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Send in the Clowns’.

I tell Pavel that
Ghost of Chance
is the antidote to everything that surrounds us. Burroughs is beginning to look like the last thin man in America, the magus of lean prose, all gristle and strike. And he floats without visible strain both ways in time: which is one of the principle benefits of paranoia. The Burroughs take on ecology, by way of animal hybrids, human stupidity, is as valid as the practical trail notes of Gary Snyder or the mammal rhapsodies of Michael McClure. Burroughs is talking
extinction
: a Museum of Lost Species, the Four Horsemen riding through ruined cities and neglected, weed-grown farms. Dust Bowl Kansas is where the virus burns itself out, its victims have died by the millions. Homo Sap, Burroughs asserts, is the only species that kills for the sheer beauty of the ugliness of the thing. To protect the malignant spirit within. Language, the ultimate virus, ultimate curse, separates us from other living creatures.

Pavel, with his index-card memory-system for dates and addresses, reminds me that McClure came from Wichita. On the
map it seems that Wichita is just down the road to the south-west, a little closer than St Louis to the east. A short haul in US terms down Interstate 335. No more than, what, 200 miles? Three hours? Allen Ginsberg, when we had our conversation in Regent’s Park in 1967, talked about driving through here in a camper van on the big American quest, fragments of which he published as
Wichita Vortex Sutra.
I asked him what he was working on.

‘Ah, scribbling. That’s all. I don’t have any schematic thing. I just follow what happens. I have a long poem of which
Wichita Vortex Sutra
is a part. It’s travelling around the United States using a tape recorder, in a Volkswagen, a camper, with Peter Orlovsky at the wheel and I’m in the back at a table. And I include all the relevant data that comes to my attention: the car radio, whatever newspapers are lying around, the news broadcasts coming through, the landscape through the window, the stops for coffee, the plains or forests or mountains we are passing through, the thoughts going on inside my head, portions of the conversations in the car. In other words, all the simultaneous data of those instants, with the Uher funnelling them, reducing them to language.’

And in other words again: the soundtrack for a silent film by Stan Brakhage or a flick through a bunch of Robert Frank photographs for
The Americans.
A radio-beam circumnavigation of the territory where Burroughs would come to die. Flash frames from Vietnam. The Pepsi Generation. The Chinese written character for ‘truth’. ‘Has anyone looked in the eyes of the dead?’ Dipping downward through low hills, rising narrow on the far horizon. ‘I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas.’

Arriving in Wichita, Ginsberg marks it as the site where ‘McClure’s mind burst into animal beauty’. There are multiple superimpositions as we deprogramme invasion karma; we speak with borrowed tongues in our mouths. The cut-up tape, in its abrupt declamatory phrases, and the prominence it grants to advertising slogans and cubist scraps of found headlines, echoes the vortex of Wyndham Lewis and Pound, and the war to end all wars; but it also, and more importantly, zeroes in on the weird space–time
anomalies of the landlocked settlement, where the great oceans, Pacific and Atlantic, are a distant rumour. Here is origin: in the sense of a propulsive need to escape.

Brakhage, the film-poet from Kansas City, forges a close collaborative friendship with McClure: in San Francisco. They are blood brothers of the Vortex that is geographically aligned with an area somewhere west of Wichita. The poet Charles Plymell called this place: ‘about the centre of the United States’. He said that it had ‘much significance’ in ancient cultures. He found a map from the late nineteenth century depicting the Cheyenne North Path from Oklahoma to Yellowstone. The sacred site is clearly marked. It’s the furthest point north for the Navaho, where east–west trails intersect around Monument Rock. The Wichita Vortex draws them all in: medicine men, ghost dancers in buffalo helmets, prairie drifters, redeye bikers, and the sodality of disenfranchised writers who trust to songlines, coincidences, Tourette’s syndrome quotations.

Pavel froze over his untouched bucket of side salad. He could see his neat little BBC radio piece dissolving into psychogeographic madness.

‘Plymell drove out there with his son. They heard a voice that was neither human nor animal. He found out, later, that this phenomenon was known as the call of the Tent Shaker, a shamanic entity without form. Rocks, he said, have male and female energies. You can use them to get on the astral grid. There are clusters of iron meteorites and impact craters in amazing patterns. The flow back into the troposphere takes the form of a double-helix vortex spiral. That’s what brought Burroughs back to Kansas. That’s what he is tapping with his orgone accumulator: immortality, dissolution of molecules. A method of lifting clear of the pinched suit of skin.’

Fancying a turn of the pool, to shake off the residue of planes and cars, I went out early to look for a swimming costume. Futile. The mall close to the hotel featured designer outlets, sharp Armani suits in black, high-concept T-shirts the size of bedspreads. The best that the combined efforts of Abercrombie & Fitch, Benetton, Brooks
Brothers, Ralph Lauren, Saks Fifth Avenue could come up with was a pair of grey wool jogging pants that sagged and threatened to slide around my knees as soon as I broke the rippling blue chemical surface. ‘Water is your hinge.’ I remembered Carlos Castaneda and how the Yaqui magician, Don Juan, submerged his apprentice in an irrigation ditch: as the pivotal point between worlds. In the Sheraton Country Plaza you could swim – in November nobody else did – out from the basement, under an arch, into the open air.

Before we set off for Lawrence and our rendezvous with William Burroughs, I walked down to the river and followed it until it became a man-made canal or sewage channel. The elasticated stretch of soul, between myself and Anna, America and Hackney, was at its critical point. There is a line in the
Beat
DVD I found in Croydon, probably lifted from Malcolm Lowry and
Under the Volcano
, but given to Keifer Sutherland’s Burroughs in Mexico City. ‘When you stare into the abyss, be sure that the abyss will stare right back.’

Once you are clear of the city and out on the highway, the film flows. Pavel has a medical condition that forbids him to register anything beyond his personal space, the way he grips a black satchel between clamped thighs. The recording kit and the ring-binder with the names and phone numbers are snug in his lap. He is incapable of telling me when a turn-off is approaching, or which lane I need to position us in. The landscape is flat farm country. I take the unilateral decision to come off-road, to ask for confirmation that we haven’t slipped into the pull of the Native American Vortex. (The Kansas whirlwind in
Wizard of Oz
was an obvious precursor of the astral stairway.)

Bumping down a dust track towards a solitary farmhouse, with no sign of human habitation, I think of Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
and the mindless massacre of the Clutter family. When we get to Lawrence, I ask Burroughs about this. He snorts. ‘Humpfff. Other side of the state. West Kansas. Ugly place, ugly people.’

To cover up his navigational deficiencies – and he’s otherwise
excellent company, mute or muttering – Pavel asks about my history with Burroughs. He knows that this is the big encounter of our transcontinental journey. And that I don’t need the great man to say one word. I want the opportunity to see if he exists, in physical form: before he doesn’t. Before he switches channels. Like Anna, so I discover from
My Education: A Book of Dreams
, Burroughs has been experiencing levitation. ‘A neutral timeless space-less place of shadows. I can levitate because there is no gravity here.’ As he comes back to ground, in his dream, he encounters a woman who doesn’t see him. Her husband is a Weather Cop.

Dublin, 1962. New people exploring an old town set around the curve of the bay, Howth Head to Sandycove. Inky ghosts in soft rain. Humans outlived by their clothes. Solitary walks become conversation pieces at the shoreline, along the river, into evening suburbs. With the usual consequences. All that innocence. The tide went out for ever, rippling contours of worm casts, sick molluscs, the tall chimneys of Ringsend and Irishtown. We would float a magazine. And its name, glorying in failure, elective obscurity, would be:
Albatross.

We sent out flyers to everybody: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Paul Bowles, Djuna Barnes, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett. Some of these mythic figures were honoured by additional cards or letters. There would be a trial edition to raise funds. Then our ‘bi-annual’ literary bombshell would be fired at the world from the sleepiest of launch pads: Winton House, 53 Strand Road, Dublin 4, Eire.

One person in the universe responded to our request for a contribution: William S. Burroughs of Tangier, Morocco. He wanted his text read across and down. An accompanying note from the author stated: ‘This is an experiment – one of many possible – in altering the conventional page format and drawing lines of narrative off the page.’ But we never figured out, with jobbing Dublin printers, the proper technology for this effect. Later, we toured the far west in a loud white sports car, trawling for a provincial firm reckless enough to risk the wrath of the priests. Magazines would be routinely
banned within the university and I would have to endure some pompous (and ill-informed) don telling me about how he’d seen all this lower-case nonsense years ago, with Cummings. ‘There’s nothing as old hat as the avant-garde.’

Calder had not yet published the first English edition of
Naked Lunch.
The Digit paperback of
Junkie
, issued in 1957, had already vanished and would become a legendary rarity. Burroughs was a fiction of the New York subways, rolling drunks, as real/unreal as Richard Widmark in Samuel Fuller’s
Pickup on South Street.
Bill was on a cannabis farm in East Texas or Louisiana, watching his wife knock lizards from the trees with a rake. This man was a personage as remote from our experience as Homer. In newsprint and magazine photographs, he looked like a composite, a suspect Xeroxed so far from source he might be a Civil War veteran or a hard-veined Chicago exterminator in the 1920s. An alien – alien from what? – disguised by good English tailoring and living where you least expect him. With the blinds drawn.

Three thin sheets of Burroughs text in a blue airmail envelope.
He took some room with another gentleman. It was a long time ago. My brother he went crazy.

Albatross
never saw the light of day. Maybe fifty copies of the trial run were produced. They disappeared. Buff wrappers. Stapled. 81 pp. If this freely distributed magazine can be described as ‘published’ – and off they went to the copyright libraries – then
Albatross
would be around the fiftieth item in the checklist of William Burroughs contributions. And the first to appear in Ireland. The same text did eventually make the listings when I recycled it in Trinity College’s official and long-standing literary magazine,
Icarus
, in May 1965. Maynard and Miles gave it the number
C125
in their Burroughs bibliography of 1978.