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Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam<br />
‘Patti Smith queens your pawn - Anarchy prevails - It<br />
is poetry which breaks the bars of jails!’<br />
No sooner had I finished than a<br />
thoroughly stoned Herman comes strolling towards<br />
the stage, his face beaming with a broad smile.<br />
“Alles okay, baba? I ask.<br />
“I’m fine, man, just fine,” he drawls.<br />
Followed by, “I brought some friends with me.”<br />
The friends were half a dozen wellseasoned<br />
Hell’s Angels, each of them holding a large<br />
bottle of beer. Herman would be knocking out<br />
poems, not singing songs. And minus his band, these<br />
dudes were his backup boys.<br />
They accompanied his<br />
recitations by stomping their<br />
feet in cadence to his words. It<br />
was a perfect performance that<br />
saw the audience cheering and<br />
howling for more. They got<br />
more, though not from Herman.<br />
He’d disappeared with all but<br />
one of the Angels, the tallest of<br />
the lot. Who then approached<br />
me and politely asked if he could<br />
recite a poem. I said sure,<br />
introduced him, he stepped up<br />
to the mike, pulled a tiny slip of<br />
paper from his jeans’ bicycle-key pocket, and<br />
“In New York if<br />
you’re carrying<br />
and shoot someone<br />
in self-<br />
defense, no one<br />
will bother<br />
you.”<br />
William<br />
Burroughs to<br />
Eddie Woods<br />
proceeded to recite an unbelievably sweet love poem.<br />
A pin-drop silence gave way to a round of applause.<br />
Bringing the reading to a close, I made a<br />
point of thanking William for the many hours of<br />
reading pleasure he’d afforded me over the years.<br />
“Pleasure?” Simon snarled loudly. “He’s<br />
trying to stick a knife in your heart!”<br />
“And if I get a kick out of that,” I snapped<br />
back, “what’s it to you?”<br />
The audience filed out...to the main hall,<br />
the café, the bar, the house dealer’s counter, wherever.<br />
We participants, sans Herman, adjourned to the<br />
Melkweg office, with the Angels tagging along.<br />
“Where’s Jack?” Angel Jack demanded to<br />
know from William.<br />
“He’s wherever you care to find him,” Bill<br />
responded, in his mind meaning Kerouac.<br />
“I’m Jack,” said Jack, stabbing at his own<br />
chest with a forefinger.<br />
“Oh, yes, I know what you mean,” Bill<br />
replied with a wise nod of the head. “It’s all in the<br />
Tibetan Book of the Dead.”<br />
“Eddie, get those guys out of here,” Soyo<br />
Benn pleaded with me, “before they drive William<br />
nuts.”<br />
I forget how exactly, but I got them to<br />
leave without a fuss.<br />
William made his exit shortly afterwards.<br />
We shook hands. Then referring to the remainder of<br />
the opium he’d already gulped down, he said: “Thank<br />
you, Eddie, I’m well away.”<br />
William and I next saw each other in 1985<br />
when he and his manager James Grauerholz, in<br />
company with Benn, visited Ins & Outs Press for a<br />
long afternoon into early evening.<br />
Plus we spoke on a live telephone<br />
hookup (that the audience could<br />
hear) during a 1993 Soyo Bennorganized<br />
Burroughs Tribute at the<br />
Melkweg that I co-emceed. And I<br />
had Bill affirm that I was not the<br />
Eddie Woods who witnessed him<br />
accidently shooting and killing his<br />
wife Joan Vollmer Burroughs in<br />
Mexico. (Literary Outlaw, Ted<br />
Morgan’s biography of William, had<br />
many people seriously believing it<br />
was me.)<br />
“No, Eddie,” Bill said<br />
dryly, “it wasn’t you.” And went on to describe my<br />
infamous namesake. Red hair, short, a good nine<br />
years younger than I, et cetera. I wrote about all of<br />
this in the essay “Thank God You’re Not Eddie<br />
Woods” that I delivered at the William Burroughs<br />
conference Naked Lunch@50 in Paris, 2009, and was<br />
subsequently published in Beat Scene.<br />
Btw, I was only half-joking when I said that<br />
Burroughs and Gysin were partners in cut-up crime.<br />
1) I don’t much care for the technique. (Neither did<br />
Gregory Corso, who collaborated on Minutes to Go<br />
only reluctantly); 2) To the extent it has any validity, I<br />
consider Harold Norse to be its real master. As<br />
exemplified in his ground-breaking novella Beat Hotel;<br />
3) I by far prefer Burroughs’ straighter writings to any<br />
of the cut-ups. None of which negates Norman<br />
Mailer’s 1962 appraisal of Burroughs as “the only<br />
American novelist living today who may conceivably<br />
be possessed by genius.” Hear, hear. That’s my Bill<br />
Burroughs, all right.<br />
© 2014 by Eddie Woods<br />
EDDIE WOODS is at http://eddiewoods.nl/<br />
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