Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I hope you're
ready to get a little weird today. A little.
Okay, a lot weird. And I don't mean, you know,
quirky weird. I mean, staring into a mirror until
your face turns into a tentacle monster weird.
We are wading into some truly murky, fascinating,
and honestly, sometimes... terrifying waters
it is certainly a departure from usual fare we
are talking about a man who is arguably one of
the most influential cultural figures of the
20th century and yet if you just look at his
rap sheet he looks more like a career criminal
than a literary icon It's a strange juxtaposition,
isn't it? We are talking about a Harvard graduate,
a scion of American industry who also happened
to be a heroin addict for most of his life. Right,
and a convicted killer, albeit in absentia. And
a man who believed quite literally in magic as
a form of technology. We are talking, of course,
about William S. Burroughs. The man who wrote
Naked Lunch, the godfather of the beat generation.
The guy who ended up influencing everyone from
Kurt Cobain to the entire cyberpunk genre. That's
right. And our mission today is to try and reconcile
these massive contradictions. We have a huge
stack of sources here, biographical details,
critical analysis, his own journals. And we're
going to try to answer a fundamental question.
How does a boy from a wealthy St. Louis family
end up living in a locker room in the Bowery?
The bunker. The bunker, yeah. Shooting paint
cans with a shotgun for art and rewriting the
rules of literature because he believed he was
possessed by a demon. And that's not hyperbole.
For Burroughs, that was the literal truth. And
I think to understand him, you have to look past
the cool junkie image that pop culture has kind
of pasted onto him. We need to look at his philosophy.
The ugly spirit. We are definitely going to unpack
that. It sounds like the plot of a horror movie,
but for Burroughs, it was his daily reality.
It was. And before we get into the wild stories,
and there are plenty of them involving guns,
drugs, and severed fingers, we need to set the
tone. This isn't just a biography of a writer.
This is a look into a worldview that saw the
entire world as a system of control. Control.
That's the key word for today, right? Absolutely.
That is the thread that runs through everything
he did. Whether it was the government, the police,
addiction to heroin, or even the structure of
language itself. Language itself. Burroughs spent
his entire life trying to find a way to break
out of the control system. He viewed himself
as a sort of cosmic escape artist. So let's start
at the beginning. Because when you see pictures
of Burroughs later in life, that stark three
-piece suit, the fedora, the glasses, that very
dry expression, he looks like a banker. He does.
He looks like a conservative grandpa. And in
a way, he started out exactly where you'd expect
a banker to come from. He really did. The appearances
were very deceiving, but also historically accurate.
He was born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. Okay.
And the name Burroughs meant something very specific
in American industry. His grandfather, William
Seward Burroughs I, was the founder of the Burroughs
Adding Machine Company. Okay, so let's pause
there. The Burroughs Adding Machine, that's basically
the grandfather of the computer, isn't it? It's
a proto -computer. In many ways, yes. It was
the machine that allowed corporations to organize,
to count money, to streamline bureaucracy. It
was a tool of order and calculation. So you have
this incredible irony right out of the gate.
A huge irony. The grandfather invents the ultimate
tool of corporate control. And the grandson spent
his entire life trying to destroy that very concept
of control. That is just, it's poetic. So we're
talking real money here. Old money. We're talking
significant prominence, yes. And it wasn't just
on his father's side. His mother's brother was
a man named Ivy Lee. Ivy Lee? That name sounds
familiar. It should. He was a pioneer in public
relations. He basically invented the modern press
release and his main client, the Rockefellers.
So he was the guy cleaning up the image of Standard
Oil. Precisely. So Burroughs is growing up in
this very high society, respectable environment.
He attended private schools. He grew up on a
street called Pershing Avenue in the central
west end of St. Louis. It was a gated, manicured
existence. But the family didn't actually own
the company by the time William came along, right?
He wasn't a billionaire. That's a crucial detail
that often gets confused. No, they weren't billionaires.
His parents sold their stock just before the
1929 stock market crash. Wow. They sold it for
about $200 ,000. Now, in today's money, that
is something like $3 .7 million. I mean, impeccable
timing on their part. Incredible timing. And
this describes the financial safety net that
defines Burroughs' entire life. When he graduated
from Harvard in 1936, his parents put him on
a monthly allowance. $200. $200 a month in the
late 30s. That was a living wage. It was more
than a living wage. It was a comfortable middle
-class income. But more importantly, you have
to understand, it was freedom. That money guaranteed
his survival for the next 25 years. He never
had to clock in. Never. He never had to hold
down a traditional 9 -to -5 job. He could travel,
he could experiment, he could drift. He could
afford to be an outlaw because he had a capitalist
safety net. It's the ultimate irony, isn't it?
The money from the establishment, from an adding
machine company, is what funded the ultimate
counterculture rebel. Exactly. He never had to
answer to a boss. He never had to curb his behavior
to keep a paycheck. That allows a certain kind
of personality to develop, you know, completely
unchecked. And the cracks. They showed up early.
He wasn't a normal kid playing baseball in the
sandlot. Oh, far from it. By all accounts, he
was a deeply strange child. He was prone to hallucinations
from a very young age. There's a famous story
of the green reindeer. I read about this. He
was, what, four years old? Four or five. He was
playing in the woods behind his house, and he
had a vision. He saw a small green reindeer about
the size of a cat. That's scary. No, not scary
at all. It was magical. Later in life, after
he studied anthropology at Harvard, he identified
this as his totem animal. So he was already seeing
things or interpreting the world through this
kind of magical lens way back then. Absolutely.
He described seeing ghostly gray figures playing
in his bedroom. He felt comfortable with them.
He said he felt a sense of wonder, not fear.
It suggests that his barrier between what we
call reality and vision was porous from day one.
And then there's the finger incident. This one.
This one made me wince. It feels like something
out of a psychological thriller. It is disturbing,
but it reveals so much about his psychology.
This was 1939. Burroughs is a young man. He's
graduated from Harvard. He's studied medicine
in Vienna for a bit. Right. He's traveling in
Europe and he's struggling with his mental health
and he's struggling with his sexuality. He was
gay. But this was a time when that was heavily,
heavily stigmatized and illegal. The pressure
must have been immense. Of course. So he became
infatuated with a man and to impress him or perhaps
as a gesture of extreme emotion to prove his
devotion. He deliberately severed the last joint
of his left little finger. He cut off his own
finger joint with what? A pair of poultry shears.
Oh, my God. And he just sat there and did it.
He later wrote about it in a story called The
Finger, but it shows you the intensity of his
personality. There was a masochistic performative
streak there, a desire to damage the physical
body to prove that the mind was in charge of
it. It's like a rejection of the physical. It's
a rejection of control. Even the control. His
own body had over him. So he's got the Harvard
degree. He's got the allowance. He's got the
missing finger joint. And eventually, he drifts
to New York City. This is 1943. And this is where
history gets made. This is the birth of the Beats.
Right. He meets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
But you have to understand the dynamic here.
Burroughs was older. He was already in his late
20s, whereas Ginsberg was just a student at Columbia.
So he wasn't their peer. No. He was the mentor.
He was the bad uncle. The experienced, world
-weary figure. He was the guy your parents warned
you about. Don't hang out with William. He has
poultry shears and weird books from Europe. Precisely.
He was the one with the apartment, the allowance,
and the, uh... the real experience in the criminal
underworld. He introduced them to Oswald Spengler,
to Selene, to the darker side of literature.
And he was also the one who got them entangled
in a murder case. The Carr -Kammerer incident.
We've touched on this in other deep dives, but
let's recap how Burroughs fits into this specific
mess. So Lucien Carr was a friend of theirs in
this circle. He killed David Kammerer, a man
who had been stalking him for years. It was a
messy, tragic situation. An act of self -defense,
Carr claimed. That was his claim. But Burroughs
and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses
because they didn't report it. In fact, they
tried to help Carr dispose of the weapon and
the evidence. They went to the movies while Carr
was trying to figure out what to do. That goes
beyond literary rebellion. That is being an accessory
after the fact to a homicide. It was a very harsh
wake -up call for the group. It shattered whatever
romantic, bohemian innocence they might have
had. And for Burroughs, it was one of his first
real brushes with the law. And this is what led
to that book they wrote together, right? And
the hippos were boiled in their tanks. Best title
ever, by the way. It is a memorable title, taken
from a news headline about a fire at a circus
they heard on the radio. They wrote it in 1945,
alternating chapters. It wasn't published for
decades, but it was the literary result of that
shared trauma. But for Burroughs, the trajectory
was already spiraling downward from there. Oh,
yes. After the murder, things get darker. He
starts using morphine around 1945. And not just
using, he was selling heroin in Greenwich Village.
He was a pusher. He was, a small -time pusher.
And this is where Joan Vollmer enters the picture
properly. She was living with him in the apartment
with Ginsberg and Kerouac. She was brilliant,
very well -read, arguably as smart as any of
the male beats, but she was addicted to Benzedrine.
Amphetamines. So you have Burroughs on Downers,
morphine and Joan on Uppers, Benzedrine. A volatile
chemical mix in a very volatile environment.
They formed a common law marriage. They had a
child, William S. Burroughs Jr. or Billy. But
their life was just chaos. They left New York,
moved to Texas to try and grow marijuana. That
didn't work out. It did not. They moved on to
New Orleans. And in New Orleans, the law started
closing in. The police raided his home. They
found drugs and crucially unregistered handguns.
Guns were already a big thing for him. Always.
He had a deep, lifelong fascination with weaponry.
He saw them as extensions of the will. So to
avoid prison in Louisiana, specifically Angola
State Prison, which was a terrifying place, notorious
for brutality, he fled. He fled to Mexico. Joan
and the kids followed him down. And this brings
us to the tragedy in Mexico. This is the moment
that changes everything. If you are listening
and you think you know the story, you need to
hear the details because it explains everything
that comes after. It is the pivot point of his
entire existence. It's 1951, Mexico City. Burroughs
and Joan are living there. By all accounts, it
was an unhappy time. Burroughs was off heroin,
but he was drinking heavily. Joan was suffering
from Benzedrine withdrawal and drinking too.
And the dynamic between them was getting nasty.
Very. Accounts from friends say Joan was mocking
him, calling him impotent. He was openly pursuing
other men. There was a lot of tension. One night,
September 6th, they were at a party at a friend's
apartment above a place called the Bounty Bar.
Everyone is very intoxicated. And Burroughs has
a gun. He allegedly took a star model .380 automatic
pistol out of his travel bag to show it off.
He was trying to sell it. And in a moment of
drunken bravado, he said to Joan, it's time for
our William Tell act. Now, for anyone who doesn't
know the William Tell legend, it's the archer
who shoots an apple off his son's head to prove
his marksmanship. Exactly. But Burroughs didn't
have a bow and arrow. He had a pistol. And Joan.
She played along. She put a highball glass. Some
say it was a gin and tonic on her head. She was
going along with it. She was giggling, according
to witnesses. She was out of the game. A dark,
drunken party trick. God, it's just, the negligence
is suffocating. Burroughs sat at the table across
the room. He raised the gun. He fired. He missed
the glass. He shot her in the forehead. She died
almost instantly. It's just, it's such a senseless,
stupid, tragic waste. A life ended because of
a party trick. It is. And the aftermath was messy
and, frankly, corrupt. Burroughs was arrested.
He spent 13 days in jail. And then what? Then
the machinery of his privilege kicked in. His
brother came down from St. Louis with money.
Lawyers were paid off. Ballistics experts were
bribed to testify that the gun had misfired or
that it had dropped. He changed his story, right.
The initial story was the William Tell Act. That
was the initial story he told police. Then it
was revised. The official story for the court
became that he dropped the gun, that it fell,
and discharged accidentally. But the witnesses
knew the truth. The witnesses knew the truth.
He was eventually convicted of homicide and absentia
because he fled the country when his lawyer got
into his own legal trouble. He got a two -year
suspended sentence. which he never served. So
he kills his wife and he essentially walks free.
He goes back to his life. But psychologically,
he didn't walk free. No. And this is where we
get into the ugly spirit. This is the core of
this entire deep dive. Burroughs explicitly stated
later that he would never have become a writer
if it weren't for Joan's death. That's a heavy
statement. It almost sounds like he's justifying
it or finding meaning in it. It's more complex
than that. He wrote, I live with a constant threat
of possession and a constant need to escape from
possession, from control. He believed that at
the moment he pulled the trigger, he was possessed
by a malevolent entity he called the ugly spirit.
Now, do you think he meant that metaphorically?
Like, oh, I have demons, I have a dark side.
He was very, very clear that he meant it literally.
He said his concept of possession was closer
to the medieval model. He believed an alien entity,
an invading consciousness, invaded him and used
his hand to kill Joan. That sounds like, I mean,
that sounds like a psychological defense mechanism
to deal with unimaginable guilt. It could be.
And that's the rational interpretation. But for
Burroughs, it was his metaphysical reality. And
writing, writing became his method of exorcism.
So he wasn't writing for fame. He wasn't writing
for art. He was writing to save his soul. He
was writing to fight a demon. He viewed writing
as a form of sorcery. He believed that the word
itself language was a mechanism of control. A
virus. And the ugly spirit used words to control
him. So to fight back, to keep the demon at bay,
he had to write his way out. He had to break
the language. That recontextualizes his entire
career. He's not an author. He's a magician fighting
a duel. Precisely. And that duel took him away
from the Western world entirely. After Mexico,
he drifts through South America. He's looking
for a drug called Yage. What we now call ayahuasca.
Why ayahuasca? This was way before it was trendy
for tech bros to go do it in Peru. Right. He
wasn't looking for spiritual enlightenment in
the modern sense. He was looking for telepathy.
He believed Yage was a kind of truth serum that
would allow him to communicate without words,
thus bypassing the control system of language.
You've got to get outside of language. Get outside
of the virus. His letters from this time were
collected in a book, The Yage Letters. It's a
fascinating look at his mindset. But eventually,
he lands in Tangier, Morocco. 1954. The interzone.
That's what he called it. Tell us about Tangier
in the 50s. Why was it the perfect place for
him? Tangier was a geopolitical anomaly. It was
an international zone governed by a committee
of different nations, which meant essentially
that no single nation's laws really applied.
So it was lawless. Effectively, yes. It was a
haven for spies, smugglers, eccentrics, and exiles.
Homosexuality was tolerated. Drugs were legal
or easily available over the counter at pharmacies.
And most importantly for him, it was cheap. So
his $200 a month allowance could let him live
like a king. Or like a ghost. He fell deep into
addiction there. He was using a drug called eucadol,
which is a very strong opioid, and eating mejun,
a potent confection made of marijuana, honey,
and spices. He essentially locked himself in
a room for four years. Just him and the ugly
spirit. And the typewriter. He sat in this state
of altered consciousness, just generating text.
He wasn't writing a story with a beginning, middle,
and end. He was writing routines, satirical sketches,
hallucinations, memories of St. Louis. He would
write a page and just throw it on the floor.
This pile of paper became known as the word hoard.
Yes. Thousands and thousands of pages. A chaotic
mess of genius and filth. And his friends had
to come rescue him, basically. Kerouac and Ginsberg
and Alan Anson arrived in Tangier in 1957. The
cavalry arrives. They did. They found burrows
surrounded by these papers looking gaunt and
haunted, and they essentially acted as editors.
They typed up the handwritten scrawls. They tried
to find some kind of structure. They literally
taped pages together. That collection of chaos
became Naked Lunch. Naked Lunch. It's such a
weird book. If you pick it up expecting a novel,
you are going to be very, very confused. You
are. It's nonlinear. You can dip in anywhere.
It's a series of routine skits, almost, that
are satirical, grotesque, and horrifying. It
attacks everything. The death penalty, bureaucracy,
medical malpractice, capital punishment. Not
even the title. What does that mean? Naked Lunch.
Kerouac apparently mistyped it from Burroughs'
handwriting. It's supposed to be Naked Lust.
But Burroughs loved the mistake. He kept it.
He kept it. He said it means a frozen moment
when everyone sees what is on the end of every
fork. Meaning seeing reality exactly as it is.
The naked, unvarnished truth of what we are consuming.
Exactly. The algebra of need. He used heroin
addiction as a metaphor for everything. Consumerism,
politics, religion. He argued that everything
is a relationship between a pusher and an addict.
The state is a pusher. The citizen is an addict.
And actually, the American government hated it.
Oh, they loathed it. It was first published in
Paris by Olympia Press in 1959. When Grove Press
tried to publish it in the U .S., it was prosecuted
for obscenity in Massachusetts. This became a
landmark legal battle. Why was this trial so
important? It became the last major literary
censorship trial in the United States. Writers
like Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg testified
that the book had literary value. They argued
that just because it depicted ugly things didn't
mean the book itself was obscene. It was a moral
condemnation of those ugly things. Exactly. It
wasn't promoting them. And the argument won.
In 1966, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts
declared it not obscene. That ruling effectively
ended literary censorship in America. If Naked
Lunch, which contains some truly shocking sexual
and violent content, could be published, anything
could. So Burroughs, the junkie outlaw, the wife
-tiller, actually secured freedom of speech for
writers in America. That is a huge part of his
legacy. He subverted the moral system and the
legal system. He forced the culture to look at
the ugly things it wanted to hide. OK, so Naked
Lunch is out. He's a controversial figure, but
he doesn't stop there. He moves to Paris and
things get even weirder. He discovers the cut
up. Now, this is the part that I think is most
relevant to our modern world of algorithms and
remix culture. This is part four. He's at the
Beat Hotel in Paris around 1959. It's this rundown
boarding house in the Latin Quarter, but it's
filled with artists. And Burroughs meets a painter
named Brianne Gyson. And Gyson is the one who
shows him the technique. Yes. The story goes
that Geisen was mounting a drawing. He put down
a stack of newspapers to protect his table, and
he cut through them with a razor blade. When
he looked at the sliced layers, he noticed that
the words combined to form new sentences. Funny
sentences. Profound sentences. And for most people,
that would just be a collage. Oh, look, Daddy
has poetry. Exactly. But for Burroughs, it was
a revelation. Remember his obsession with control
and the ugly spirit. He believed language was
a control system. He believed that the structure
of our language subject, verb, object, locks
us into a certain way of thinking. It forces
us to think in linear time. It limits what our
brains can do. So if you cut the paper... You
break the timeline. You break the control. Burroughs
was adamant. He said that cut -ups are not for
artistic purposes. For him, they were a tool
of political warfare and scientific research.
He thought that by cutting up texts, you could
actually predict the future? He did. He called
it letting the future leak out. He believed that
everything is pre -recorded. The universe is
a tape recording. By cutting the tape or the
text, you can see what's coming next. He claimed
he would cut up a newspaper and find sentences
that referred to events that happened days later.
That is some heavy magical thinking. But he was
serious about it. Deadly serious. He and Geisen
were doing occult experiments at the Beat Hotel.
Mirror gazing. Scrying. Like a wizard looking
into a crystal ball. Yes. Burroughs would stare
into a mirror for hours. He reported seeing his
hands turn into tentacles. He saw his face transform
into an other, a green man -like entity. He believed
he was seeing his other selves, or perhaps the
entities that were trying to possess him. He
was trying to map the unseen geography of his
own mind. It's terrifying, but also... Creatively,
it worked for him. He wrote the entire Nova trilogy
using this method, the soft machine, the ticket
that exploded, Nova Express. Those books are
dense. They are very difficult to read because
they are literally cut up. Paragraphs are spliced
together randomly. But the theme is consistent
throughout. Humanity is under attack by a virus
from outer space, and that virus is language.
Language is a virus from outer space. That's
one of his most famous quotes. And he meant it.
He thought language was a parasitic organism
that had invaded the human host, using us to
replicate itself. Thinking is just the virus
thinking through you. Okay, let's move on. Part
five, the London years. He leaves Paris and goes
to London. And here, he tries to get clean again.
He does. He hears about a Dr. John Dent, who
had a specific cure for heroin addiction using
something called apomorphine. Apple morphine.
What is that? It's a derivative of morphine,
but it's not psychoactive. It doesn't get you
high. It acts as an emetic. It makes you vomit.
The theory was that it regulated the metabolism
and reset the body's need for the drug. Burroughs
was convinced it was a miracle. He wrote a famous
piece called Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous
Drugs, praising this cure. Did it work for him?
For a while. He advocated for it fiercely his
whole life. But during this London period in
the 60s, he also got involved with something
else that claimed to have a technology for the
mind. Scientology. Wait, William S. Burroughs
was a Scientologist? For a time in the 60s, yes.
He joined the Church of Scientology in London.
He took the courses. He reached the level of
clear. I cannot imagine Burroughs taking orders
from anyone, let alone an organization like that.
Well, that was the problem. He actually liked
the techniques, the auditing, the e -meter. He
felt they were useful tools for exploring the
mind and deprogramming trauma. He said it helped
him with his writing. But he hated the organization.
Why? He felt it was authoritarian, secretive,
and suppressed any critical thought. He saw it
as just another system of control. So he took
the tools and ran. And he turned on them. He
wrote critical articles about his experiences.
There was a huge feud that played out in the
pages of Rolling Stone magazine. Burroughs versus
the Scientologists. He famously wrote, Scientology
is a model for the control of a population. I
love that. He's just picking fights with everyone,
the government, the literary establishment, L.
Ron Hubbard. And during this time in London,
he starts refining his magical attacks. Yes.
We absolutely have to talk about the mocha bar.
Yes. The Mocha Bar Operation. This is my absolute
favorite Burroughs story because it's so petty
but so elaborate. So this is 1972. There's a
coffee bar in London on Fritz Street called the
Mocha Bar. And Burroughs felt he was treated
rudely there. He claimed the cheesecake was poisonous
and the service was surly. As one does, most
people would just, you know, leave a bad tip
or a bad Yelp review. Not Burroughs. Burroughs
decided to destroy the business using magic and
technology. How? What did he do? He used a technique
he called playback. He went to the bar with a
concealed tape recorder and discreetly recorded
the background sounds, the clatter of cups, the
chatter, the hiss of the espresso machine. Okay.
Then he would come back day after day, stand
outside, and play those sounds back at a subliminal
level. He would also take photos of the place,
then go home and curse the photos. He was playing
the bar's own pass back to it. Yes. His theory
was that by superimposing the past audio onto
the present reality, he would disrupt the timeline.
He wanted to break the reality of the location.
He called it scrambling the control lines and
creating a psychic disturbance. And did it work?
Well, according to Burroughs, accidents started
happening inside. The espresso machine broke,
fights broke out, business dropped off, and on
October 30, 1972, the Mocha Bar closed down for
good. He cursed a coffee shop out of business
with a tape recorder. She viewed it as a successful
magical operation. For him, cameras and tape
recorders were not passive devices. They were
weapons. They could freeze and manipulate time.
That is some real -life cyberpunk sorcery right
there. It really is. And this brings us to his
return to America, part six. In 1974, he moves
back to New York City. To the bunker. He moves
into a converted YMCA locker room on the Bowery.
No windows, just concrete walls and communal
showers down the hall. He called it the bunker.
And this is where he becomes the godfather, the
elder statesman. Exactly. It's the mid -70s.
The CBGB scene is exploding. Punk is happening.
Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry,
Susan Sontag. They all make the pilgrimage to
the bunker to pay homage to the old man. He's
the one who lived through the things they were
just starting to experiment with. But he was
also struggling, right, financially and physically.
He was. His allowance had long since run out.
He was teaching writing. But then a man named
James Growerholz arrived. This is a key figure
in Burroughs' later life. Who was James Growerholz?
He was a young bookseller from Kansas, a huge
devotee of the Beats. He came to visit Burroughs
and basically realized the man needed help. He
became Burroughs' secretary, then his manager,
literary executor, and essentially his savior.
What did he do for him? He organized his life.
He cataloged the word hoard. Most importantly,
he organized reading tours. He got Burroughs
out of the apartment and onto stages across the
country and Europe. He turned Burroughs into
a performing artist. Which revitalized his career
and his bank account. Suddenly, William S. Burroughs
was a rock star of literature. But amidst this
big comeback, there was a deep personal tragedy
occurring in the background. His son, Billy.
The boy who was there or nearby when his mother
was shot. Yes. William S. Burroughs Jr. Billy
grew up effectively without a mother and with
a mostly absent father who was traveling the
world looking for drugs and enlightenment. And
he also became a writer. He did. He wrote a great
book called Kentucky Ham. But sadly, he became
an addict too. Speed, alcohol. Like father, like
son. But Billy didn't have William's Iron Constitution.
In 1976, Billy's liver failed completely. He
had a liver transplant, a pioneering surgery
at the time. Burroughs spent time in Colorado
helping him recover. It was the most time they
had spent together in years. Did they reconcile?
Was that a healing moment? It was strained. Billy
had written an article in Esquire basically blaming
his father for poisoning his life. He felt the
way of the name, the legacy of his mother's death.
And tragically, Billy kept drinking and using
drugs even after the transplant. Then he died
young. He died in 1981 at age 33. He was found
in a ditch near a highway in Florida. It was
a heartbreaking, squalid end. That must have
weighed on Burroughs immensely. It did. The guilt
over Joan, the failure with Billy. It reinforced
his belief that he was cursed or that the ugly
spirit destroyed the people around him while
leaving him alive. He was a survivor, but at
a terrible cost. Everyone around him seemed to
fall, but he just kept going. That's a very accurate
way to put it. He was the eye of the hurricane.
So after Billy dies, Burroughs makes a very surprising
move. He leaves New York. He leaves the bunker.
He moves to Kansas. Lawrence, Kansas. 1981. Why
Kansas? It seems like the absolute last place
a heroin -shooting, queer, avant -garde magician
would go. He told people it was practical, it
was cheaper, it was less violent, and crucially,
he could go fishing and shooting. Shooting, right.
We haven't talked enough about the guns. He was
a huge gun enthusiast. Burroughs loved guns.
He owned many. Cobras, Colts, shotguns. In Kansas,
he could go out into the cornfields and target
practice without the NYPD bothering him. This
leads us to his visual art. The shotgun art.
He would set up spray paint cans in front of
a piece of plywood, then stand back and blast
them with a shotgun. The paint would explode
onto the wood in these abstract patterns. It's
the cut -up technique again, but with ballistics,
it's violent and random. Exactly. It's about
surrendering control. You pull the trigger. And
the result is dictated by physics and chance,
not by the artist's conscious hand. It was the
ultimate expression of his philosophy. So he
really settled down in Kansas, became this local
celebrity. He did. He lived in a small bungalow.
He had cats. He absolutely adored cats. He became
a sort of kindly eccentric old neighbor who just
happened to be a counterculture legend. And this
is when he starts popping up in pop culture everywhere.
The 90s were huge for him. He became an icon
all over again. The 90s were a renaissance. He
was in the movie Drugstore Cowboy playing an
old junkie priest. That famous line. You see,
you have to be a priest to be a good drug fiend.
He collaborated with Tom Waits and Robert Wilson
on the play The Black Rider. He recorded with
the Industrial Metal Band Ministry. He was in
a U2 music video for Last Night on Earth. And
Kurt Cobain. That collaboration is legendary.
They recorded The Priest They Called Them Together.
Cobain playing dissonant guitar noise while Burroughs
read a story. Cobain absolutely idolized him.
He even came to visit him in Lawrence, Kansas.
It's tragic that Cobain, another figure struggling
with addiction and the pressures of fame, sought
him out. Burroughs actually felt sorry for Cobain.
He said later, there's something wrong with that
boy. He frowns for no reason. Burroughs, the
old survivor, recognized the doom in Cobain.
He knew Cobain wasn't going to make it. Let's
touch on the 23 Enigma. This is another weird
Burroughs thing that has really entered the culture.
It is. Back in Tangier, he met a ferry captain
named Clark. Captain Clark bragged he'd been
sailing for 23 years without a single accident.
That very same day, his ship sank, killing him
and everyone aboard. That evening, Burroughs
heard on the radio that Flight 23 from New York
to Miami had crashed. And the pilot's name was
Clark. The pilot's name was also Captain Clark.
From that moment on, Burroughs started collecting
occurrences of the number 23. He believed it
was a cosmic signal, often associated with death
or synchronicity. Now, if you look for it, you
see 23 everywhere. It's a classic example of
confirmation bias, but... It's classic Burroughs.
He hacks your perception. Once he points it out,
you can't unsee it. It's a virus of an idea.
We also need to talk about his politics, because
he doesn't fit in any box. You can't call him
a liberal or a conservative. He really doesn't
fit anywhere. He was a staunch, lifelong, gun
-loving Second Amendment supporter. He said,
I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society
where the only people allowed guns are the police
and... the military. Which sounds very right
-wing libertarian. But he was also a radical
libertine who hated the government, hated bureaucracy,
hated the police, and wanted total drug legalization.
He called himself a frontier individualist. But
he lived on a trust fund and, as the source says,
used the GI Bill to pay for his studies in Mexico.
Oh, absolutely. He had a quote. I always say,
keep your snout in the public trough. He hated
the system, but he was more than happy to exploit
it. He saw it as getting some of his own back.
That is practically honest, at least. It fits
his philosophy. If the system is a machine of
control, you don't owe it any loyalty. You take
what you can to survive. In his later years,
he even joined the Illuminates of Thanateros,
an order dedicated to chaos magic. So he went
all in on the magic. He went all in. And he did
survive. Against all odds, he lived to be 83.
He died on August T, 1997. He had a heart attack
in Lawrence. He is buried in the family plot
in St. Louis, right next to the white granite
obelisk of his grandfather, the adding machine
tycoon. Back to the BNX? Full circle. The man
who invented a tool of control and the man who
tried to smash it. So what is the legacy here?
When we look back at William S. Burroughs, what
do we see? We see the grandfather of the counterculture.
Without him, you don't get the Velvet Underground,
you don't get punk, you certainly don't get cyberpunk.
William Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer, owes a
huge debt to Burroughs' ideas of interzone and
reality hacking. A term heavy metal comes from
here, too, right? It does. It appears in his
novel The Soft Machine. Character Uranian Willie,
the heavy metal kid. And then there's Steely
Dan. The band Steely Dan. The band Steely Dan
is named after a steam -powered dildo in Naked
Lunch. No way. That smooth jazz rock band is
named after a sex toy in a Burroughs book. Absolute
fact. His DNA is in the bloodstream of our culture,
often in places we don't realize. Soft Machine,
other band, Thin White Rope. The list goes on.
But beyond the trivia and the band names, it's
the ideas. The idea that reality is malleable,
that language creates our world. And that we
are living in a magical universe. Burroughs insisted
that there are no coincidences. Nothing happens
unless someone wills it to happen. That is both
an empowering thought and a terrifying one. It
places the ultimate responsibility on the individual.
If you are controlled, it's because you haven't
figured out how to cut the wires yet. You know,
thinking about his central warning. that language
is a virus a control system it feels incredibly
relevant right now how so well Look at the world
we live in. We are living in the age of algorithms.
We have AI generating text, generating images,
generating a kind of reality on social media.
We are swimming in a sea of manipulated information.
We are constantly being fed a narrative. That
connects perfectly to Burroughs' cut -up philosophy.
He believed that by cutting up the word lines,
you could break the programming. You could disrupt
the narrative and see what was really there.
But now the programming is writing itself. The
machine is generating the language that we consume.
Which raises a provocative final thought, doesn't
it? Burroughs warned us that control seeks to
make us predictable, to turn us into machines.
He used a pair of scissors and a tape recorder
to fight back. In an age where our thoughts are
increasingly shaped by predictive texts and algorithmic
feeds, are we living in the ultimate control
system he prophesied? And if language is a virus
from outer space. Have we all been infected?
I think the answer, according to Burroughs, would
be a resounding yes. The question is, what are
you going to do to break the spell? On that note,
maybe go pick up a pair of scissors and a newspaper.
See what the future holds. Just be careful what
you let leak out. Thanks for listening to The
Deep Dive. We'll see you in the Interzone.