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Billy Burroughs’ Prediction
Despite the humor of his intellect as demonstrated
in his writing, if truth be told, Billy is, for the
most part, a sad sack. He knows the new lease on life
he’s been given is a short-term lease, no matter the
star status of his South African transplant of a transplant
surgeon, Doctor Starzl.
He is so medicated both from
the morphine he injects for
the pain of the arthritis that
came with the transplant and
from the excessive alcohol -
Schmidt’s Malt Liquor, please
- and from the steroids he
takes to ward off organ
rejection (Billy once told me:
If I look at a cold, I catch it) .
. . Billy is so medicated that
he’s mostly a man on the nod.
He spends much of his time in
an overstuffed chair. Alice in
Wonderland is the theme of a
collage he has affixed to the
wall opposite his chair.
On a couple of
occasions I accompany Billy to
a an apartment north of
University Hospital on the
west side of Colorado where
an assemblage of hospital
junkies gathers to swap pills,
drink beer, and generally
banter with each other like
addicts at an NA meeting
telling drug stories, except
these attendees are not on the
wagon, are not taking thirteen
steps towards sobriety and
abstinence. In the middle of
the living room, the lessees -
Ernie and Ray, two Viet Nam
veterans with serious problems
related to the draft, their
military service and exposure
to Agent Orange - have placed
a thirty gallon plastic trash
can. It is filled with empty
alcohol bottles, crushed cigarette packs, and the debris
of fast food existence. Most attendees at the daily
medication exchange rarely rise to pitch their empty
long necks, Coors cans, and hamburger wrappers,
into it, like basketballs into hoops, from their surrounding
lawn chair seats The occasional marijuana
contributed to the get-together is most welcome as
cannabis is not something prescribed across the street
at University Hospital, where the drugs being swapped
originate. Of course, Billy does not offer to barter
with his morphine, only some of the minor barbiturates
he’s been prescribed. Around the circle I note
some curious exchange rates: five Valium for one
Thorazine, a carton of Camels for one Dilaudin.
But there’s more to Billy B than drugs and
despair, more than woe is pitiful me. For Billy B, he is
a gentleman and a scholar. Billy B has died and been
born again, not in a Born Again Christian sort of way,
but rather in a born again beatnik sort of way. He
writes beautiful poems on scarps of Safeway paper
49
Photo of Billy Burroughs in Lyons,
Colorado in 1980 by Marcia Ward