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Billy Burroughs’ Prediction
and the author of Speed and Kentucky Ham, himself,
William S. Burroughs Jr., Billy B. As a gesture of
goodwill and friendship towards and kinship with
Larry and Steve, Allen has come to Bowery Books to
autograph some first editions thereby increasing the
value of Bowery Books’ Beat literature collection, and
Allen is giving Billy, who has moved here to Denver,
Allen’s version of the Poetry Tour of Denver.
When Allen Ginsberg introduces William S.
Burroughs, Jr. to Larry Lake and me, the reader/
writer/junkie in Larry immediately recognizes the
reader/writer/junkie in Billy, and, thus, the proprietor
of Bowery Books and the publisher of Bowery Press,
Larry Lake, he turns on the charm for his celebrated
guests. For the next hour Larry and Allen banter and
gossip tales of mutual friends: Stuart Zane Perkoff and
James Ryan Morris, Diane Di Prima and Robert
Creeley, Tony Scibella and David Meltzer, while Billy
B and I, we mostly listen.
And naturally, or as this story will demonstrate,
preternaturally, Billy likewise recognizes the
kindredness between himself and Larry; and when
Larry suggests that Billy should sometime read
something from his novels at Café Nepenthes, the
poetry reading that Marcia and I host in lower
downtown Denver, Billy, who is known to demand big
bucks for a reading, accepts, all without discussing
payment. I figure he’s hoping to score in terms of
reading material, turn-ons and connections.
Over the course of the next year or so I
pursue a friendship with the creature that is Billy
Burroughs. I say creature, because not unlike Frankenstein,
Billy B, he’s come back from the dead.
Another’s liver keeps him alive, that of a woman
named Virginia whose brain failed at about the same
time that Billy’s original liver did.
Billy lives at the Oxford Arms, one of a pair of
sixteen-plex apartments just south of University
Hospital on the east side of Colorado Boulevard. On
Number Sixteen, his door, is a handwritten announcement
that emphatically states “If you’re not from
Boulder, you’re NOT WELCOME. Go Home. This
means YOU!” When I read the admonition for the
first time, I’m annoyed, wondering if I’m to be
dismissed as not from Boulder, for from what I’ve
learned from my study of modern American poetics,
Denver, my adopted hometown, is, in fact, the
birthplace of beat sensibility. I even have an unredacted
copy of a letter to Ed White that I got from
Larry in which Jack Kerouac, himself, does declare
the rank of Denver’s own Neal Cassady’s writing to be
among the greatest of America and modern Europe.
Billy’s furnished apartment is as messy and
muddled as is his health. A couch lines the south wall
out of the center of which sticks the non-business end
of a bayonet, the blade buried to the hilt in the cotton
stuffing with its tip in the wall behind. Above the
couch is an assemblage of magazine photo cutouts.
Now the number of cigarette burn holes in the seat of
the couch is alarming, given the number of people
who live in this building. One generally doesn’t
consider the possible carelessness of others when
signing a lease, and the burn holes spell jeopardy and
danger. On the stove sits a stew that never really runs
out as Billy B adds to it whatever edibles he has on
hand. When I lift the lid I am reminded more of
slurry sludge than food. Whatever vegetables might
have been in the mix have over time and reheating
been reduced to mush. Even the remains of a hot dog
that Billy claims to have added just yesterday seem
about to liquefy. Needless to say, neither my ex Italian
mother-in-law or my current German mother-in-law
would be caught dead in Billy’s kitchen. Skieve!, Filth!
would be their refrains.
Billy and I, we do literary events together, and
Billy, per the arrangement we made the day we met,
does read at Café Nepenthes, my current Tuesday
night Market Street gig. I collect twenty when I pass
the hat and add thirty myself so Billy’s pay turns out to
be a cool fifty bucks for a half hour’s reading.
Better pay than my lawyer’s, I remark when I
hand him the cash.
Immediately after his feature reading, I take
Billy home to his apartment as he has scant interest in
the late night world I revel in, and he has no interest
in the poets and poet tasters who attend. And,
granted, my waiter’s hours are not sympatico with his
pain relief schedule. I drive him in my Dodge Tradesman
van a couple of times to Naropa Institute in
Boulder to visit Allen Ginsberg and other visiting
literary luminaries. He seems to enjoy the attention
the Naropa-ites, students and teachers alike, shower
upon him. After all, he is no literary slacker. He’s
already had two novels published and sundry articles
in national magazines including one in Time about the
abusive superintendent of a juvenile facility in Florida.
On subsequent visits to Billy’s apartment, he
reads to me some very poignant and humorous short
stories about his stay in the hospital post-surgery,
about wandering the corridors and deep basements in
the wee hours of hospital late shifts, running once into
a wide-eyed, burned-black crispy corpse on an
elevator gurney, and often into over-medicated
maintenance staff in restricted areas.
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