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Billy Burroughs’ Prediction
bags, and he seems to possess a special gift, a heightened
intuitive sense, that, as this story will demonstrate,
is downright spooky. His harsh comments
about the state of our great nation are painfully true.
His discontent and disgust, his despair and disrespect,
are based on experience, not politics. Yet hidden
amongst the unkempt and sometimes bitter persona
that Billy B shows the world, there resides a spirit
more angelic than demonic. Perhaps Billy got more
than just a liver from his donor, Virginia, for there are
otherworldly qualities to Billy, as if all the pain and
medication and fear have parted the veil betwixt now
and forever. On occasion Billy sometimes sports a
trickster smile in the shadow of his derby hat that
even seems to enlighten the darkened corners of Ernie
and Ray’s misaligned minds.
Sooooo anyway, I throw a birthday dinner
party for Billy, his thirty-third and last. In attendance
at my house on South Pearl are Billy, his drug swap
buddies, Ernie and Ray, Larry Lake and his new bride
Barbara, entrepreneurial bakers Marie and Melvin
Neumann (who bring beautifully braided rye and
wheat loafs to the celebration), the artist Kelley
Simms, best man at my wedding, Lenny Chernila, the
poet Andy Clausen, myself and my wife Marcia. The
menu is East Coast Italian: antipasto, Caesar salad,
sausage and spaghetti with a scratch Marinara sauce.
The birthday cake is an over the top, incredibly rich,
New York cheesecake, (the secret recipe for which I
received as a wedding present from friends of my first
wife’s parents. In fact, when my first marriage hit the
rocks, I jumped ship with only it, the secret recipe, to
face the future with. I used to sell slices of it for a
buck at street fairs, a price far below its value; and
when satisfied customers, commenting on its superior
qualities, would say that I ought to sell it for more, I’d
make it known the secret recipe was available for ten;
and I’d make a princely profit on the sale of Xerox-ed
recipes.)
Anyway, after Billy blows out the thirty-three
candles that yin-yang atop his birthday cake, there are
good wishes wished and toasts toasted to a future that
proves shorter and bleaker than anyone but Billy
might have guessed. And then, after a pause, Billy,
with stoned eyes a sparkling, makes a prediction,
prognosticating with a question directed at Marcia.
“So when are you going to make your big
announcement?”
Marcia blushes a bit and stares at her
questioner imploringly, as, apparently, she has no idea
what Billy’s talking about, and says so.
“Ah, come on, he continues, tell us about
it.”
“Tell you what? I don’t know what you’re
talking about.”
Billy sighs, smiles, and rephrases his request.
“When are you going to tell us about the baby?”
Somewhat alarmed, yet with a mixture of
naughty delight and hopeful anticipation, while
simultaneously defensive, Marcia soundly refutes the
thrust of Billy’s innuendo.
“I most certainly am not pregnant.”
Billy sighs again, smiles again, and adds, “Ah
yes, so you think, but nonetheless, you are. I would
never kid about something like this. Being pregnant is
not funny. Believe me. You are going to have a baby.”
The next day, bothered yet excited by Billy’s
prediction, Marcia buys an early pregnancy test, and
sure enough: she’s pregnant. I guess we were not as
careful as usual the night of Tommy Larkin’s marriage.
Too much wine and too much passion will do that to
young lovers at an Irish Catholic wedding.
Sadly, the following March, some three weeks
before the birth of my first son, Passion, Billy dies.
The story I hear is that after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration
in January of Nineteen Eighty-one, the new
president’s first Presidential Directive, his first volley
in his War on Drugs, is to forbid the use of morphine
for out-patients, a directive that greatly affects Billy
and his pain relief. Denied his out patient morphine
regimen - one he’s grown totally addicted to - Billy
opts to split Denver and return to Florida where he’d
spent some happy days prior to his liver failure and
transplant. The urban myth is that on the twenty-five
hundred mile bus ride from Denver to Gainesville,
Billy looks at a cold and catches it, a cold that, within
short order, kills him, demonstrative proof that a mix
of steroids and viruses can be lethal.
Doing the backwards math, Marcia and I
figure that she had been a mere thirteen days pregnant
when Billy made his prediction, demonstrative proof
of Billy’s special gift, of his intuitive ability to read
others, their condition, and their future, a trait he
once told me his grandmother had divined in him.
Too bad Billy B never met my son, the proof of his
prediction.
Editor Note...Of possible interest...Cursed From Birth: The
Short Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr, published by
Soft Skull Press as a paperback in 2006. Still in print I
understand.
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