William S. Burroughs: A Man Within Page #4

usually more or less foredoomed.

Well, first of all, his cousin,

Prynne Hoxie in St. Louis,

who went off to a different

university, Princeton,

and then died

a year and a half later...

in a drunken accident

in New York.

He was decapitated by...

a tunnel.

And then

he fell in love with a boy

at Los Alamos Ranch School.

And there was a big disgrace,

and little Billy ran away home

to St. Louis...

and couldn't go back

Los Alamos at all.

Sent off for his diaries.

And as he wrote,

when the box arrived with

the fearful diaries in them,

he couldn't wait to rip it open

and make sure he could destroy

the offending pages.

Some of these things

were examples of how

he had tried to write...

and why he had given up.

He says, "Fact is,

I had gotten a 'sickener.'"

Meaning like a jail sentence.

I mean, his boyfriends

like Jack Anderson,

the one that he cut

his finger off over...

and who helped him wreck

the family car.

Lewis Marker, the American

student at Mexico City College,

who was probably pretty

good intellectual company,

but was not gonna commit

his life to Bill Burroughs.

So he very much was thinking

of boyfriends as members of

a class different from him.

After I had lived with William

for several weeks...

and then began my relationship

with Richard Elovich,

my first lover,

I remember William

commenting once,

"See, you and Richard,

you have this idea

about, uh,

intellectual and social equals

being a couple."

He says, "In my day,

that's just unheard of."

I mean, you know,

it was an interclass thing."

[ Marcus Ewert ]

In the fall of '89,

I met him at his old place...

his old stomping grounds

in the Bowery... the Bunker.

And at that time, I was 18.

I was a freshman in college.

I was already basically

Allen Ginsberg's boyfriend.

Um, but I always kind of planned

out that I would still hook up

with William...

when and if the opportunity

presented itself.

Were you sexually interested

in me at that time?

Uh, I don't...

Not particularly.

Because I don't

remember any...

I don't remember any, um...

any such thing.

Mm-hmm.

How come?

'Cause I was kind of cute.

Looking back

with hindsight.

Well, I don't know.

If it was

like an ordinary

relationship...

in one of his novels,

it was usually

the theme

of, um,

chasing after somebody

that didn't quite...

want to have anything

to do with...

the author of

what you were reading.

Which was, I think in Queer,

something that was shown

like what his writings

were for.

They were love letters

to make the person that

he was interested in laugh.

'Cause they were

almost comedy routines.

[ Genesis Breyer P-Orridge ]

In a way, he was somebody who

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