Call Me Burroughs by Barry Miles

Author:Barry Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Literary, History / Modern - 20th Century, History / United States - 21st Century, Biography & Autobiography / Gay & Lesbian
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

Bill took the packet boat to Marseille with Alan Ansen, who had also been taking a break in Tangier and had decided to accompany Bill back to Paris. Bill demonstrated his latest psychic discoveries and Alan was suitably impressed. Bill asserted that there was a magnetic attraction between his stainless steel scrying ball and a magnifying mirror he had bought. He claimed that every time the mirror was positioned near the ball, the ball moved away. Alan assured him it was indeed the case. In fact Burroughs was now finding the ball painful to use. In Tangier he had begun to feel a physical pressure operating on his body, pushing him away from the ball, which made him so uneasy that he had to sleep with the light on. Things jumped from his hands. He told Allen, “Well, I will not turn back (even if I could).”29

He also told Allen that he no longer thought about sex; he didn’t know if he was interested in man or woman, or both, or neither. He said that his analysis had, “with a slow scalpel of fact, cancelled my sado-masochist visa to Sodom. I wonder if any but the completely innocent can enter without a S-M Visa? I don’t know.” This was not the first time he had expressed doubts about his sexual orientation, but his lack of sex drive was more likely attributable to his severe drug habit. Back in Paris, in order to maintain his addiction but keep himself clean in the event of a police raid, Burroughs began taking box after box of Eubispasme pills. These were codethyline, an alkaloid extracted from opium, small black pills available at any pharmacy in France without a prescription and sold as a cure for the grippe. France is still the only country in the world where opium extract is sold freely at pharmacies.30 He even kept his supply of kif out of his room in case the police visited but was clearly not assiduous enough in his housekeeping because when they eventually came, they found a couple of cubes of hash.

Alan Ansen returned to Venice and Bill found himself more or less alone in Paris: Shell decided to return to the United States. Bill was sorry to see him go because he already regarded him as part of a triumvirate of mystical experimenters: “the three mystics I had hoped to form nucleus and get something definite and useable via cross-fertilization—Shell, Gysin and Stern.”31 Shell told Bill that he was going to buy an ounce of heroin and smuggle it back to the States. Bill didn’t want to hear about it. When Shell tried to sell it in Houston, the buyer informed on him and he got twenty years. Burroughs thought he was lucky not to be busted at customs. He told Allen, “Imagine that idiot going back with a saxophone and loud clothes… a saxophone!!! My God, how fucking stupid can a man get…?”32 Bill was sure that the police were watching him from then on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.