“Do you see it?”

William Burroughs was old enough to have been my grandfather when I met him. He had the patrician bearing, manners, culture and style unique to highly educated members of the generation that lived through the great depression, a world at war and witnessed massive genocide, the actual facts of nuclear weapons. Visiting my grampa was a stultifying bore. Hanging around with William Burroughs was epic, dangerous fun.

He always had excellent weed and plenty to drink. He enjoyed getting loaded, playing with knives, guns and exotic weapons. He routinely did things that are illegal. Sometimes he would set things on fire. He said outrageous, hilarious things and could quote Shakespeare, perfectly, at length, no matter how drunk he was. Superstars came to visit him. He believed in space aliens, ghosts, demons and often did experiments with magic. He cured the planter’s wart on my left foot with his Wishing Machine. (I’m not making that up.) He was a gifted teacher, surrounded by books and worldly experience. He encouraged careful reading with attentive, critical openness, balanced against real experience, leading by example. He knew which lines NOT to cross, from experience, and his warnings were not bullshit. His house smelled like Old Spice Cologne, pot smoke, gunpowder and a peculiar deodorant spray he used in a futile attempt to mask the odor of a half dozen unruly cats. He made Art.

After his dear friend Brion Gysin died in the early summer of 1986, William began making paintings in earnest. Not long after that he asked me to help him use photographic techniques in creating visual analogies to cut up recordings. I still am not sure why he asked me, when he could have asked any one of many more accomplished photographers. I was a suburban hayseed and very callow. I barely had the skills he needed. I did, and do love his vision. It seems to embody and reside at the source of some kind of raw cosmic creative energy. Maybe he liked that about me?

I would come over to his house in late mornings. He always had his materials ready. He always offered to get me high and I always deferred until we were finishing up. The first time I came by he asked me to shoot macro detail slides of some of his favorite parts of pieces he was working on. “Do you see that fox, right there, coming out of those bushes?” he would ask, pointing at a swirl of color on wood. Even though I wasn’t the slightest bit high yet, I could nearly always see exactly what he described. It was amazing to me. “Look, there, that’s a 1934 Duesenberg. Do you see it? Coming out toward you?” I did see it –it was right there!- and I photographed it for him.

The next step was coming over to his house with the slides and a slide projector to project the macro images onto other paintings and see what emerged. For this we both got ripped. We would darken the house and move the projector and the paintings around until… something… seemed to take form. Then I would photograph that with negative film for making color prints. A few times we became very excited. Sometimes while I was working he would wander off with an unspoken understanding that I should keep at it as I saw fit.

Once when I was very high and alone in his front room the absurd glorious importance of the experience really hit me. The place was always magical and at that moment I was completely aware of it. After another hour of unraveling weird little visions from the alchemy of slides projected onto his paintings, I took my camera off the tripod, put a faster roll of film in it and explored around the house and yard making pictures of all the cats, spirits and dioramas flitting before my eyes. I eventually found him out back by the garage throwing a huge knife into a sheet of ¾” plywood. “Well, is that it for today?” he asked, handing me the knife. We spent the rest of the afternoon thwacking the knife into the target. He eventually used nearly all the prints from that roll.

Oh how I miss him.

Philip Heying
Lawrence, Kansas
October 2013