Sunday, August 10, 1997
Book Review
Dead Beat
A conversation with WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
and A.L. Bardach
In the 1920s, everybody knew what they were going to do and saw nothing wrong with what they were offered. They would be doctors and lawyers and that would be all, right. I would go into my father's business. I was brought up in a Midwestern, partly Southern, matriarchy.
[During World War II] I worked in Chicago as an exterminator. Then went to New York. It was in New York in 1945 that I had my first 1 experience with heroin, with street friends like Herbert Hunke. I took it and I liked it and I went on taking it. That was all.
I don't think that heroin addiction has anything to do with emotional problems. There was never any question in my mind that t there was any important psychological aspect at all. People exaggerate their problems.
My marriage was not a marriage of convention at all. Not at all. No! Joan [Vollmer] was a friend of Jack [Kerouac]'s. She was a very remarkable and very intelligent person. She was married twice before I knew her- but not to Kerouac- to ordinary people. There are a lot of marriages where there is some sex, but not very much. She was a Benzedrine addict, and I've always hated speed. I hate it. She was one of those people who just hated any kind of opiates. 1 She couldn't -see what anyone saw in them. I've given an account of her death once [she, was accidentally killed by Burroughs during a game of William Tell], and I don't want to talk about' it again. She's buried in the American cemetery in Mexico City. I just felt that was the only thing to do.
Billy [Burroughs' son with Vollmer] died about a month ago. I last saw him in Denver six months ago. The doctors warned me. He had a liver transplant about five years ago, and the operation has about a 50% mortality rate. He was 33. He was raised by my mother and father. He grew up in Palm Beach, Fla. He did marry, and they were separated. He didn't have any children. After the transplant, Billy didn't take very 'good care of himself. He was still drinking. Allen [Ginsberg] and I talked to his doctor about giving him a maintenance dose of morphine to get him off alcohol and calm him down because he was in a bad state with the steroids he was taking. He would get into these terrible rages from the steroids ,when he started screaming and throwing and breaking things. It could be very disconcerting to someone who didn't know him.
He tried to hitch his way back to Miami, and the police found him collapsed in a doorway and took him to the hospital. They called us. It was pneumonia because he had no resistance to infection. They discharged him, but he got sick later and checked back into the hospital. He died about three or four hours later. He was cremated. In Florida. [Long pause] A very, very good friend of mine arranged everything for just a very, very small amount of money. Of course, it's traumatic to outlive your child. Of course, I knew about his illness. He had five years. I knew he couldn't live a long life.
I get up around 9 o’clock and have breakfast. If I'm working, I'll work from around 10 to 6. I never eat lunch. Maybe I'll have a sandwich or buttermilk and crackers. If I don't feel like working, I'll go through my files or go to a museum or take a walk. I go to bed around 10:30 or 11. I'm pretty healthy. I'm pretty healthy.
William S. Burroughs, who died Aug. 2 at 83, was a founding member of the Beat Generation. These remarks were excerpted from a previously unpublished interview with Ann Louise Bardach conducted in 1981 in Los Angeles, California.