Last Words

“He was always kind to me except when—drinking—”

To set the record straight: William Seward Burroughs, who created the first practical adding machine. Died in Citronelle, Alabama, of TB age 41. He left four heirs: Horace, Mortimer, Jennie, Helen.

Administrator of the estate had the word: “buy the family out—$100,000 each.” Big money in those days, when a silver dollar bought a first-class meal couldn’t be bought now for any price, or a good piecea ass.

At the insistence of my mother, Dad held back a small block of Burroughs stock. With remainder bought the Burroughs Glass Co.

Facts. Bits of detail filter back from Mother. Dad had killed a little colored boy years ago. Goes into a dark room, and there is brother Horace with claws—

Mother on Horace:

“When he came into a room it was like someone had walked out”—

Killed himself by breaking out a window and cut his wrists with the glass shards—? Don’t sound like a junky to me.

Horace here:

“It wasn’t, Bill. They killed me. They is just who you think.”

“Why? What about Helen? Horace—come in?”

Did he? Many long years ago—

Yagé mucho da.

Sees a fox.

“Why not?”

No dreams last night I can remember back now.

You got dope, you got hope.

Just let your hand take over and …

“Easy, in any drugstore. Walk in, flash a fiver and—the morphine is right ready, and of course, the syringe.”

First vein shot was an accident.

“Who cut into you Horace?”

He wasn’t special, but he was always there—and that’s a basic secret: just be there. He didn’t cut his wrists.

Very confused images—ignorant Armies clash by night—

“It is getting just too tiresome.”

Horace has a sort of English lower-class feel to his spirit—nasty and cheap, but he ain’t lying when he says he was murdered …

“You’ll cover for us. Listen I run. We know, respectable. Well, let’s keep it that way. Guy was depressed—and so … fill in the blanks.”

Yeah, I guess.

What coulda done it?

Well, what did it.

The room could never be rented again. Roomer left after one night, complaining of showers of glass in dreams getting always more real, sharp.

Even so it’s still weird.

So what. Articulate it.

How many species became extinct? And why?

About half a million, they tell me—always something inexpressibly sad about the last of a line.

December 15, 1996. Sunday

To miss a cat is to miss your cat, part of you.

It hurts physically, like an amputation. There on top of the sofa, on the side of the sink where she always ate. It hurts.

As Wordsworth, that old child molester, said:

“She died and left to me

this heath this calm this quiet scene

The memory of what has been

and never more will be.”

Many spiritual disciplines establish as a prerequisite of advancement the attainment of inner silence. Rub out the word. Castaneda in The Teachings of Don Juan stresses the need to suspend the inner dialog—rub out the word—and gives precise exercises designed to attain a wordless state.

Rub out the word—laughable if you will, Leslie—

Alan—hear me?

Yes, William.

Well—the dream—don’t surrender. It’s a trick!

I went down under a hail of dream bullets. They don’t kill. I had made my point and position clear. That P.P. very stratospheric, way out.

Any group acquires group markings. Feminists: self-righteous—able to believe any lie they have invented, utterly humorless—without honor or common decency in their dealing with the “sex enemy.” It’s just a bore—

Now the macho—John Wayne square-jawed, bigoted, stupid—insensitive—