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[25.8.06] [Stevens]
CURSED FROM BIRTH
 The good folks at Soft Skull have given us an excerpt of the forthcoming edited memoirs of William S. Burroughs Jr, Cursed from Birth, for your delectation. Painstakingly culled from an abadoned novel, correspondence, journals and poems by David Ohle, the original galleys of the first version (abandoned for 'legal reasons') now sell for megabucks on eBay.
"My first words to the chief surgeon when I woke up were "Fuck off." I was furious about still living. It felt comfortable being dead. I didn't want to come back. Even Death had abandoned me. A nurse asked me if I had left my body. My answer was to grab her by the tit. I was quite mad from the massive doses of steroids I was getting to hold off rejection. Steroids kill off antibodies so they don't destroy the invading organ, subjecting me to any germs that happened to fly by. Just looking at a cold, I would catch it. Steroids also have the side effects of depression and rage. One second you're happy, the next your heart turns to soot. The slightest thing goes wrong and you want to tear the building down. I broke ashtrays, I ripped magazines to shreds and threw them all over the room. I was incredibly foul-mouthed. One of the nurses described my attitude as "despicable." I shit in the bed and didn't ring the bell. I'd shit again while they were cleaning it up. I was no more the ideal patient than I was the ideal husband.
At 2 a.m. one morning I got up and headed out of the room, fell forward, pulling out my nose tube, bleeding, dragging all the machinery with me, a walking junkyard. The nurse was furious at me, but what the hell, I was up and walking. They'd been trying to get me to walk for two days. So she walked me around a little, then took me back to the room and got me all plugged back in. But I wouldn't stay put. I had to be straitjacketed and strapped down, but I was so god-awful hostile and obscene they undid me. The room had been stripped of all sharp objects after I raved and begged for something to kill myself with."
And via several people, a Paris Review Burroughs interview PDF from 1965.
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