Review by Tom Bowden
The son of a heroin-addicted father and an alcoholic mother addicted to Benzedrine, William S. Burroughs, Jr. had the kind of start in life most of us would rather avoid. Things went downhill from there when he was four after his father shot and killed the mother in Mexico. His older sister (whom he was to never see again) was sent to live with his mother’s parents, and Billy was sent to live with his father’s parents. His father skipped the country and lammed it to Tangiers, where he remained addicted to various opiates, smoked lots of dope, and wrote what would become a seminal 20th century classic of avant-garde fiction, Naked Lunch.
Growing up in the comfortable upper middle class surroundings of Palm Beach, Florida, and sent to private schools, Billy, as the son of privilege, nonetheless flailed about, an emotional misfit. His father, always distant before the shooting, he saw only on short, occasional visits to the U.S. after the shooting. (The book’s cover is particularly chilling, showing a picture of father and son, Billy appearing to be six or seven years old, with the father’s arm coming from around and behind the boy, but with his hand frozen just inches above his son’s shoulder. Whether the picture was snapped in mid-pat or just before Burroughs, Sr. gripped Billy’s shoulder, the picture nonetheless captures the emotional distance between the two.)
Cursed from Birth is a sad but compelling autobiography of a self-destructive soul (Billy) who acts as if he is fated for his particularly grueling death: hemorrhaging from cirrhosis of the liver (his second one) by the age of 35. Pieced together from notes toward a third novel he was too drug-addled to finish, and complimented by numerous interviews with people who knew him — including Burroughs, Sr., Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and others — Cursed forms a mosaic not unlike a shattered mirror reassembled.
Billy begs for money, steals from his grandmother, gets stoned with his dad, and endures a liver transplant that never quite heals and leaves him in chronic pain:
The wound, as I called it, was three inches across, eighteen inches long, and as deep as my backbone. I was gutted like a Halloween pig. It couldn’t be stitched up because of infection danger and had to heal from the inside out. When the nurse first saw it, she said, “Oh my God!” Which scared me to death. Just what I needed. And it had to be washed out with saline at least three times a day and disinfected. Slosh it in with a squirting machine, suck it out with a vacuum machine. The first time I looked down at what they were doing, I said it, too: “Oh my God!” I didn’t look down there again for weeks.
For the pain they gave me only enough Demerol to maybe cure a headache — 25mg. I used to mainline 400 and go for a walk.
And in between the bouts of pain, the half-hearted attempts to find work, the failed marriage and love affairs, is lots and lots and lots and lots of drinking.
I read Cursed from Birth as a fan of the author’s father. I wrote my master’s thesis on him in 1988, for which I also interviewed him (before he decided to “turn on the charm” to strangers, as he phrases it in his Last Words). I suspect most readers of Cursed will read it for the same reason — to find out more about the father — even though Billy’s first two books, Kentucky Ham and Speed, are still in print. From that angle emerges a man quite at odds with his public persona. (For all his hard-ass talk, Burroughs, Sr. struck me as actually quite shy.) We find a father doing everything he can — within the realm of letting his son take responsibility for his own behavior — to help his son through hard times, who sobs uncontrollably at the hospital when his son undergoes the liver transplant that could kill him (not that Billy had many options at that point in his dissolute life), who is angrily frustrated by his son’s steadfast insistence on blaming everybody else but himself for his troubles.
Cursed from Birth also stands on its own merits as a document chronicling abuse, addition, apathy, desperation, self-destruction, and death. No one comes out of this autobiography an angel, and nobody comes out wholly evil, either. Everyone here does their share of dumb things and good, motivated by conflicting desires and opinions as to what is best, what is right.
Recommended reading.
Words of advice for young people
He was lucky to get the transplant. Were there more livers available then? Nowadays, to even be listed at UCSF for a liver transplant, one has to be clean of alcohol, and even doctor prescribed opiates, and benzodiazepines, for 6 months. And the random urinalysis tests screen for metabolites. So even a non l-alcoholic beer,wine or kombucha test positive for days. Ditto for mouthwash. Valium for weeks… marijuana use is acceptable. Noted drug fiend David Cosby has, I believe, received two liver transplants… nice to be rich and connected.
Liver transplants were still a new experimental process back then—-the hospital where he got it done was at the time the ONLY facility doing them, so there weren’t yet strict protocols in place for eligibility. Plus, he was in a coma and close to dying when it was done. It was mentioned in LITERARY OUTLAW that the doctors would have preferred a more emotionally stable patient, but given that it was an emergency and any patient was going to be a guinea pig anyway, they went ahead with it.
In responce to Keith Berry’s comment, above:
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
~ Robert Oppenheimer, 1954.
Did you read the book? How did you gather the world’s worst father as doing everything he can? I ask as “the little fish” who spent time with Billy shortly before he died.
Like Bee’s to honey … junkies are attracted to stuff like this .. I should know after 25 years but it’s all good now I just found an ice dealing individual on the floor above …Sweet ….
Burroughs Sr. killed his son’s mother, then immediately abandoned him and saw him only sporadically throughout the remainder of his life. When the family asked Burroughs Sr. to have his son live with him in Tangiers, WSB Jr. reported that friends of his father tried to molest him. I also read that Burroughs Sr. provided little financial support and no emotional support to his son, and didn’t even attend his son’s funeral. But you think WSB Jr. should’ve blamed himself for his troubles??? Unbelievable.
As a lover of William S. Burroughs Sr. I knew I would love the writings of his son. This is truly an amazing story about someone who is truly cursed from birth.
I was a friend of Peter stafford in Santa Cruz california meet william Burroughs back in santa cruz in 1976 he was always drunk doing drugs but still a beautiful person, only hope he is in heaven with Peter Stafford
I absolutely love Billy Burroughs sparse writing style and have read and reread his novel Speed over thousands of times and maybe even more. I still continue to read parts that I like/love etc. I find his laconic writing style superior to Burroughs sr.
I was a hapless bystander child of 10 or so when I had the misfortune to be at Green Valley “School” with Billy. I saw him cutting apart a living soft shell turtle next to a pond. Dissecting it alive. Shell off, watching its living organs.
I was not impressed. I’m glad he is dead. I hope he rots in hell.
I’ve just ‘read’ the book, ‘William Burroughs a Life’ by Barry Miles.
As far as his son is concerned, he never had a chance… his mother was a perpetual druggie, even while pregnant with him and an incurable alcoholic – an individual no-one would want to be cursed with as a mother. In fact after he was born, William Burroughs Jnr suffered severe withdrawal symptoms. The father, was not much better, and yet is lauded as a literary great – what a joke! He was nothing more than a narcissistic dilettante who wrote essentially about his depraved and selfish life. What a pity he wasn’t more honourable for the sake of everyone around him!
The book was so nauseating, I didn’t complete it but threw it on the ground far away from me! …but at least the sun was shining and I improved my tan!
I knew Billy while growing up in Florida, and also met his grand parents. I especially remember when he returned from Tangier and complained that his father tried to get him to have sex with Bill’s older friends, which Billy resented. I only saw him occasionally after that, most memorably when he showed up at my house during a wild LSD party. But all that was a long time ago.