Monday, December 23, 2013
hair and said hello. She looked at him steadily. “Where have you been?
Why did you do this to me?” And she gave Neal a dirty look; she knew the
score. Neal paid absolutely no attention; what he wanted now was food;
he asked Joan if there was anything. The confusion began right there.
Poor Bill came home in his Texas Chevy and found his house invaded by
maniacs; but he greeted me with a nice warmth I hadn't seen in him for a
long time. He had bought this house in New Orleans with some money he
made growing cotton in the Rio Grande valley with an old Harvard
schoolmate whose father, a mad paretic, had died and left a fortune.
Bill himself only got $50 a week from his own family, which wasn’t too
bad except that he spent almost that much per week on a drug
habit...morphine; and his wife was also expensive, gobbling up about ten
dollars worth a week of benny tubes. Their foodbill was the lowest in
the country; they never ate; the children never ate either. They had two
wonderful children, Julie, eight years old and little Willie one year.
Willie ran around stark naked in the yard, a little blond child of the
rainbow who would someday jabber in the streets of Mexico City with
Indian ragamuffins and hold his own. Bill called him “the Little Beast,”
after W.C. Fields. He came driving into the yard and unrolled himself
from the car bone by bone, and came over wearily, wearing glasses, felt
hat, shabby suit, long, lean, strange and laconic, saying “Why Jack, you
finally got here; let’s go in the house and have a drink.” It would
take all night to tell about Bill Burroughs; let's just say now, he was a
teacher, and had every right to teach because he learned all the time;
and the things he learned were the facts of life, not out of necessity
but because he wanted to. He dragged his long thin body around the
entire US and most of Europe and North Africa in his time only to see what
was going on; he married a German countess in Yugoslavia to get her
away from the Nazis in the thirties; there are pictures of him with big
cocaine Berlin gangs with wild hair leaning on one another; there are
other pictures of him in a Panama hat surveying the streets of Algiers
in Morocco. He never saw the German countess again. He was an
exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons server in
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