The Dark Dreams of William Burroughs
Cut to Kansas, where the air conditioning was broken at the Hampton Inn and where I was almost relieved to hear the telephone ringing in the early hours. I went down to the lobby to hear from Burroughs’s friend and manager, James Grauerholz, that the novelist had died in the hospital the previous evening at 6:30. Grauerholz suggested that we come the next day and film at the house. “Bill loved the BBC,” he said. The whole thing passed like a Burroughs routine, we were dazed, and I took some flowers the next afternoon to 1927 Learnard Avenue, a red-painted bungalow with four steps up to a porch with a white fence around it.
There was a strange humming. The crew hung back in the car as I walked up to the screen door and peeked through. I thought I saw the singer Patti Smith and I definitely saw the poet John Giorno (the guy asleep in Warhol’s film Sleep). They were sitting in a circle and there were other men including Grauerholz, who soon came to the door. As he opened it, what seemed like a dozen cats shot out of the house. He told me the friends were performing a Buddhist chant to send Burroughs’s spirit up. I declined to join when he asked me, but seeing that the bowls on the porch were empty and licked clean, I said I might feed the cats. “Oh, man,” said Grauerholz, “that is soZen.”
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