Art Lies, Volume 11, June-September 1996 Page: 20
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Orleans, where Bill was busted.
To avoid facing trial on nar-
cotics and gun possession
charges, Burroughs left the coun-
try. He took up Aztec and Maya
archaeology at Mexico City Col-
lege and stayed in touch with his
friends Ginsberg and Kerouac.
But the change didn't help Joan.
She remained seriously hooked
on bennies.
Bill, Joan, and their two children
first moved into a place at 37 Cer-
rada de Medellin but left after
neighbors complained about them
to the police. Bill was very
unhappy and griped a lot about
having to pay $200 to bribe his
way out of the jam. But everyone
knew what he was.
Children playing in the street
called him "vicioso," junkie, then
scattered to keep the boogie man
from getting them. In July, 1951,
Bill and Joan moved a few blocks
away to Orizaba Street. After get-
ting settled, Burroughs collected
his notes and put together bril-
liant-sometimes crazed-ideas
about addict life.
That summer, Bill left on an
expedition to Ecuador in search of
yage, a drug with legendary psy-
choactive properties-later writing
about the trip in his book, Queer.
Bill returned from South America
exhausted, physically debilitated
from his addiction, and without
yage. In the days following his
return, he drank heavily. Around
mid-day, on September 6, he
heard the familiar notes from a
knifesharpener's flute coming from
the street. He went to the bed-
room for the knife inside the travel
bag he brought back from
Ecuador and went out the French
doors, through the patio, with theknife in his hand.
Tears were streaming down his
face when he returned. He could-
n't seem to get control of himself.
He was having trouble breathing.
"What the hell is the matter with
you," he asked himself. The junk
withdrawal sickness was causing
acute nostalgia. A deep depres-
sion set in. He was in trouble but
couldn't explain why, not to Joan
or himself, and Bill spent the rest
of the afternoon drinking.
Bill and Joan had a confused
union and no sexual relationship.
They had no one to escape into,
no temple of commitment where a
man worships a woman, a woman
adores a man. Bill liked young,
delicate boys. He had no accom-
plishments to speak of, except for
the first draft of a novel that he
decided needed another chapter.
Bill wrote Ginsberg that he
doubted that anyone would ever
publish his book, the one he had
titled Junk. Imminent failure was
perhaps a contributing cause but
not the only reason why Joan
would become the sacrifice.
Bill almost explained why him-
self: "I was talking to the recurrent
copy of my dreams-an irritating,
nondescript, darkish man who
would rush in when I was about to
take a shot [shoot up] or got to
bed with a boy." It was an
encounter, one of many, with the
Huitzilopochtili of his own charac-
ter. Bill and Joan drank the rest of
the afternoon, warmed by the
alcohol and the mild western sun
streaming in through the kitchen
windows.
Twenty-seven years later, on
February 21, 1978, a night con-
struction worker, digging two
meters below street level in thedowntown subway excavation,
came upon part of a carved stone
relic. Anthropologists, in less than
a week, unearthed the rest of the
enormous disk, measuring nearly
a hundred and twenty-eight
inches in diameter. The nude,
decapitated female lunar goddess
Coyolxauhqui was sculpted on the
surface. Her arms and legs were
separated from her torso when
Huitzilopochli, the god of war, the
sun, her brother, had murdered
her.
The stone was unearthed at
the foot of the Great Temple which
had two great platforms facing
west. Two sanctuaries honored
TIaloc and Huitzilopochti, repre-
senting the Aztec dependence on
agriculture (water and rain) and
conquest (war and sun). The
round executioner's stone, the
techcatl, was in front of the stat-
ues, where hearts were cut out
and pools of blood ran down the
cold, stone steps. Chacmool, who
took the messenger from the exe-
cutioner to the divinity, was repre-
sented by a reclining stone figure
in front of Tlaloc.
Like a compulsion, events were
overtaking Bill that afternoon. He
had gone out to sharpen the knife
to get ready. The sacrifice had to
come after Huitzilopochtli had
traveled the sky's roads, after mid-
day when he took the souls of
women who had died in childbirth.
Coyolxauhqui's death, like Joan's,
was a sacrifice. To make it a
famous death, an extraordinary
one, even a literary death, the
sacrifice marks the end of one
period-one kind of relationship-
and the beginning of another.
Bill, immersed in thoughts
and oblivion, barely noticing theArtLies 11 20 June - September 1990
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Calledare, Donald. Art Lies, Volume 11, June-September 1996, periodical, June 1996; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228042/m1/20/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .