I Once Smoked a Joint with William Burroughs

In my college days I attended Bard, a liberal-arts school up on the Hudson north of Poughkeepsie. I lived on campus that year in the most coveted of dorms, Stone Row, a long run of old bluestone buildings that looked like they’d been set down by some absent-minded Victorian architect. They were drafty, beautiful, and felt older than the rest of the place. I shared a suite with Mikey.

Mikey was my closest friend, big in body and big in spirit, with broad shoulders, wide head, tapering down to feet that always seemed ready to leap. He was forever leaning into some new identity he was trying to forge, scanning the horizon for who he might become next. Raised by a strict Catholic father, he pushed against all of it—religion, sex, behavior—testing the world safely with me as his wingman.

Mikey had thrown himself headlong into the Beat writers that year, the way he threw himself into most things. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso—he was reading them like scripture. Burroughs especially. One afternoon he pressed a frayed paperback of Naked Lunch into my hands and told me I had to read it. I tried, but the thing barely made sense to me. It felt like a language I hadn’t learned yet. I just couldn’t parse it. It came off like the whole thing had been typeset backwards.

A few weeks later Mikey heard that Burroughs was giving a reading at Brooklyn College, and that was that. He said we had to go. So one cold afternoon we stuck out our thumbs on Route 9 and started south. Mikey talked most of the way—punk music, sex, the Beats, all the pieces of himself he was trying to assemble. As always, I encouraged him. We had some weed, and I was happy enough to be on another adventure.

Brooklyn College’s lobby was one of those cavernous public spaces built to impress administrators more than students, bright and echoing. We’d barely stepped inside when Mikey spotted Burroughs across the room. Before I could get my bearings he grabbed a fistful of my jacket and hauled me toward him. And there he was: William S. Burroughs. At first glance he looked like my grandfather—wool suit, vest, fedora with a little feather tucked into the band.

His entourage was an odd trio. To his left stood a man about as tall as Mikey, wearing a slick polyester suit in a kind of salmon color. He had on glasses with mod-looking frames that somehow matched the suit. On Burroughs’s other side was a kid—maybe twenty at most—dressed head to toe in black leather; he looked like he’d just stepped out of a Mapplethorpe photograph.

Mikey didn’t hesitate. He marched straight up to Burroughs and stuck out his big hand, grinning in that style he had—you couldn’t decide if it was friendly or a bit psychotic. Burroughs took it politely enough. Mikey pumped his arm like he was trying to get water from a stubborn well and told him how much his work meant to him. I managed a quieter greeting, something mumbled and forgettable. Burroughs nodded his head in what might have been acknowledgment or merely an invitation to move along.

We drifted back toward the auditorium doors with everyone else. After a few minutes the man in the salmon suit appeared at my elbow, speaking in a low, conspiratorial voice. He asked if we had any marijuana. “Bill likes to smoke a little before a reading,” he said. I told him we had some. So he gave us a plan.

We found a couple of seats and waited for the room to settle. After a minute or two the man in the salmon suit slipped out from a door by the stage and gave us a quick, covert wave. So we got up and headed nonchalantly down the aisle. We slipped through the door and it closed behind us, the noise of the lobby dropping away. We were in a tall concrete stairwell, dim and dusty, and there was Burroughs by the railing with the kid in leather.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the joint, the one Mikey and I had rolled back in Stone Row. I lit it, and the four of us fell into a loose circle by the railing. The agent made small talk. Burroughs stood there quietly, waiting his turn as the joint made its rounds. If the kid in leather said anything, I don’t recall. But the agent, Mikey, and I conversed pleasantly enough.

After a while Burroughs finally spoke. His voice came out flat and clinical: “Where did this pot come from?” It was so sudden it took me a second to realize he was talking to me. I told him it was Hawaiian. He gave a slow shake of the head. “Bullshit,” he croaked. “All pot comes from Arkansas.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. It was the kind of line so far off the map that no one even thinks to answer. Bill’s statement was like a pill: you swallowed it with a shrug. It could be a hit of acid, it could be a placebo. So we just kept passing the joint and, after a moment, drifted back into small talk.

As we reached the tail end of the joint and were about to drift out of our little circle, Bill spoke again in that parched baritone of his, repeating the same words as if they still needed saying—equal parts ancient wisdom and pure nonsense. “All pot comes from Arkansas.”

We slipped back into the auditorium and took our seats. Mikey was lit up from the whole backstage adventure, his faith that we were about to hear something great untouched by Burroughs’ cryptic mutterings. I sat there thinking Burroughs might be drifting into some private orbit of his own—age, drugs, genius, who knows what combination—and that the Arkansas routine was just the first flare. I settled in for what I figured would be an hour of cosmic babble, the kind that sounds wise until you try to hang your hat on it.

But I couldn’t have been more wrong. The stage was bare except for a chair at a table with a small desk lamp. Bill entered from the stairwell, crossed slowly to the table and sat. He had a sheaf of papers with him. He adjusted his glasses and began to read. The whole room shifted.

The voice that had delivered the Arkansas gospel now carried a story that wandered through half a dozen places and characters, each scene drifting out of the next like smoke changing color. I kept waiting for the chaos to collapse under its own weight. Instead, near the end, everything tightened. The loose pieces folded inward, clicking into place like a telescope sliding shut, and suddenly the whole thing made sense—sharp, strange, and completely intentional. Mikey looked over, eyebrows lifted just enough to register triumph. I leaned toward him and said, low and stunned, “That was fucking incredible.”

Back at Bard the next day, I picked up Naked Lunch again. The text hadn’t changed, but something in me had. The sentences that once felt scrambled now carried their own strange voltage, and the rhythms I couldn’t parse before suddenly lined up into something deliberate, something luminous. I could hear Bill’s voice in my head with all its crazy wisdom. Before long I went on to read nearly all of his books—Junky, Queer, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night—books that rank among the works I’ve come to treasure most.