I was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on the Naval base there, on February 5, 1952.

Q: When and where did you attend school/college?

Left high school in 1970; one (disastrous) year of pre-med at the Medical College of Virginia; BA in English Literature in 1976 from Richmond Professional Institute, now Virginia Commonwealth University; MA in English Literature in 1978 from University of Colorado at Boulder; additional studies at Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School (of Disembodied Poetics), Boulder, 1977 to 1978.

Q: Do you have any particularly strong memories from childhood, school, college?

My childhood was fairly happy: youngest male child and baby of the family, I bore a strong resemblance to my mother, and to her side of the family, and so was her favorite. She was well-educated, and believed in home teaching.. By age 5 she had taught me to read at a 4th grade level, so that I never had much trouble with school. My father was a Naval officer, so we moved constantly, usually once every two years. I can recall having lived in at least seven different houses during my life at home.

I led a protected existence for my first five years, and most of my early childhood was fairly uneventful. But when I was about five or six, I had the dreadful experience of being sexually abused by an adult stranger. I believe he was a sailor at the Naval base where we lived at the time, Newport, Rhode Island. I remember red hair and a black P-coat. It happened quite near our quarters, in a field, near a small stream that I liked to play in. He probably saw me and followed as I walked down through the tall marsh grass that grew to the edge of the junior officer's quarters area. When I didn't return home, my older brother was sent to find me. I was injured, my clothes torn and dirty, and I recall I was confused by what had happened. My brother's reaction, when I told him what had happened, only made things worse. He became deeply frightened, and made me promise to never tell another soul. To be fair, he was only ten at the time and neither of us had a clue what was proper. We only knew a bad thing had happened. I trusted him, and did what he told me to do. Together, we concocted some tale about me falling off the stream bank, which my mother somehow accepted, and the incident became a deep, dark childhood secret that only we shared. Eventually, the event was subsumed and forgotten, but it's unconscious effects continued. I became withdrawn, shy, frightened of intimacy for much of my youth. Later, when my sexuality began to express itself and I found myself drawn to men, it took me a long, long time to become reconciled to my feelings, and longer still to learn to trust another.

Moving so frequently meant repeatedly starting at a new school, making new friends, all the tiresome rituals. I found these very difficult, and instead concentrated on learning to enjoy being alone, to entertain myself, and to develop my imaginary world. I tended to solitary and thoughtful pursuits. As a child, I was fascinated by plants and animals, especially by aquatic life, and I spent many, many happy hours simply playing alone around the nearest body of water. Having a Naval officer for a father meant that we lived near the sea, and the sea was magical to me, a place of wonder. From age 8 to 11, my family lived in Florida, and I spent those happy years obsessed with the ocean: fishing, swimming, skin diving, collecting biological specimens, and so forth. For a time, I thought I might have become a marine biologist.

However, at age 12, the family moved away from Florida, and came back north to live, first in Norfolk and later in Washington, D.C. In my early teens, I started to follow creative pursuits. This was of course part of the general awakening taking place in the mid-60's. It seemed that everyone was doing something creative, and I wanted to be a part of that. I listened to folk music and the blues, taught myself to play harmonica and guitar, mandolin, and other folk instruments, drew comic book art, wrote poetry, and generally expanded my horizons in a more or less healthy manner. These activities helped me to forge my first real friendships with people.

Of course, this was the mid-sixties, and so these friendships inevitably led to my exposure to the drug subculture, which I'm afraid I embraced eagerly and wholeheartedly. I'm afraid that I fell for that line about drugs being a way to open your mind, expand your consciousness. Unfortunately, in the end, the only thing drugs expanded in me was the consciousness that I wanted to do more drugs. I'm afraid I was an addictive personality just waiting to happen. "Real junkie material," a friend once called me, and he was right..

In those days, everyone mostly did hallucinogens and reefer. I enjoyed reefer, in the same way I enjoyed a social drink. I did LSD first at age 14 (1966), and mescaline and psilocybin shortly thereafter. I wasn't at all impressed with hallucinogens. Most of the acid we got in those days was pretty adulterated, laced with speed, and so each experience was fraught with the jitters, the miserable discomfort of a speed crash, and the threat of a bad trip throughout. I also found the mind-expanding effect to be overrated. I felt that hallucinogens were more trouble than they were worth, and started looking for something else, something more satisfying.

A little later that same year I did heroin for the first time. I was at a school friend's house, Kevin was his name, and he had two older brothers that had just returned from a tour of duty in Viet Nam. I remember they laughed a little strangely when we first stumbled in, and asked us if we wanted to get stoned. We both said yes, and asked if it was good grass. "Oh, it's good! This is smack-grass, man!" Kevin looked at me and said, "Okay, why not?" For the life of me, I couldn't think of a single reason.

There is nothing quite like the first time on heroin. Of course, I threw up several times, each time running to the toilet and hurling up everything in my stomach, to peals of laughter from Kevin's brothers in the next room. But eventually I settled down into what I now recognize as a classic nod, full of beautiful dreams. The feeling of contentment, the sheer delight of intoxication, was something I was quite unprepared for. The visions were so realistic that I continually woke myself up reaching out for things I thought I saw before me. It was startling and wonderful. The things I liked best about the heroin experience were the depth of reality of the dreamworld it created, which seemed an enhancement of reality, rather than a drug-like derangement of reality; the sheer physical ecstasy it produced; and the fact that you could actually relax and enjoy the show without discomfort or fear of any kind. It seemed to me at the time that heroin had none of the drawbacks of the hallucinogens, and was even more psychically rewarding. Of course, I know now that this was the "honeymoon" period with the drug, and that I was wrong about it all. But all I knew then was that I wanted to do heroin again, just as soon as I could get my hands on some. And God help me, I did.

During all this time, I was growing away from my father. My mother and I always had a close relationship, a friendship that adolesence couldn't shake, but I just couldn't seem to get along with my father at all. He simply failed to understand what I was about. And I confess I didn't make it easy for him. An old story, to be sure. And if it had just been that kind of thing, things might have been tolerable, but there was more: I was obviously queer, made no secret of it, and he just couldn't handle that at all. The whole Sixties hippy thing had liberated this aspect of my character, and I flaunted it. Of course, I got some trouble at school, but I didn't let it stop me. I was in a fairly hip crowd by then, so I was tolerated by my real friends, some of whom eventually became my lovers, too. But at home, the old man just couldn't handle the long hair, the unisex clothes, the effeminate gestures, the whole thing. He used to go at me pretty hard sometimes, but when he started, I would just leave and spend a few days at a friend's house, and things would blow over. I was much too interested in having a good time to worry about him.

But one day, it all came crashing down in a huge scene. My father caught me coming home late one night with some boy I had picked up in a bar. To make matters worse, he knew the kid: he was actually a sailor on one of my father's ships, no less! Well, that cut the tie that bound, I can tell you! The old man just went berserk. He ranted and raved and knocked me down a few times, telling me he would throw me into a military school. I decided it was time to get out, and all he found the next morning was an empty closet and an open window.

I dropped out of school and lived with a boyfriend in an apartment in downtown Norfolk for nearly two years, turning tricks to pay the rent and eat. My mother helped me out when she could, of course. Typically, she was completely cool with her queer son, and simply accepted it. She took what Bill used to call "a broad general view" of things: she looked at the whole blow-up with my father as a minor detour on the road, nothing to get upset about. She knew he would eventually relent. And to my surprise, in 1969 he did. By this time my parents were living up in Washington, D.C. The old man had a choice job at the Pentagon, and I think he may have been concerned about security finding out he had a queer son. In any event, he hired a private dick to bring me home (none too gently, I might add). So there I was standing in the living room, at attention of course, in front of the old man. The deal was this: he'd pay my tuition for medical school if I'd agree there won't be any more of "this queer shit." He always had a way with words, my old man.

Well, fool that I was, I went for it. My mother told me it was probably not a great idea, and she was right, of course. But I was so tired of turning tricks that I convinced myself I could please the old man somehow. So it was summer school and then a year of catch up, and finally I graduated from high school the following year, 1970. And that was how the prodigal son returned to the tender arms of his loving family.

I arrived at the medical school dormitory in September of 1970. My happiest memory of that first year is my discovery later that week that the local heroin dealers were stationed on a corner only two blocks away, a quick walk between classes. Back then, if you were white and didn't know anyone yet, you scored from the whores that strolled 2nd Street. They would score for you if you bought a cap for them. That was when a single $2 cap would get you seriously high twice. I mean stumbling, nodding, stone smacked-out high! In other words, it was hog heaven for me. There were no rip-offs, no scams, no bullshit or haggling. The street was safe for customers. The mob still largely controlled the junk in Richmond then, and they didn't allow any funny stuff with them what paid. Even the police were relatively cool, as long as you minded your own business, scored, and got off the street. It was truly beautiful, and I recall those days with a sort of blissful nostalgia.

I quickly became notorious among the medical students, easily the worst character the old place had ever seen. But surprisingly, I was tolerated by roommates and other dormitory residents who found out about my little "problem." Perhaps they knew I wasn't going to last long there anyway, or perhaps they just didn't care. They were both fascinated and repelled by my heroin use. They would sometimes watch me shoot up, always with amazement and perhaps a little disgust, but they would watch. But then, as the stuff hit me down deep and proper, and they saw the visceral change take place, the waves of pure junk ecstasy passing over my face, I would hear them whisper, "I just gotta try that shit one day!" In fact, I ended up turning quite a few of them on for the first time in that dormitory: the viral machine of addiction relentlessly propagating itself, willing the infected to mindlessly continue the chain of transmission.

By the end of that first year, my grades were tolerable in most classes, but I was flunking basic chemistry and math courses. It got so bad that my advisors told me I was going to be thrown out of school at the end of the year. I decided then to go "where a guy like you belongs," as my erstwhile roommate told me, meaning the Liberal Arts school across town. I changed majors to English Lit, which I thought I could handle, and settled into the English Department. There, believe it or not, and in spite of a heroin habit that came and went throughout my entire time there, I found a home and excelled academically. I did good work my first year, and I got better the next, and the next after that. I did work that even I thought was good. I also made close friends within the Department, gaining valuable experience dealing with the "real" world, learning to change the camouflage to fit in with the academics. In 1976 I graduated high in my class, and was offered the opportunity to come back as an associate professor (untenured, of course) after I got my masters.

Q: What did you study in University? What was your favorite part?

Well, I first studied the classics and medieval literature in my first two years. My third year work was an independent study of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and this was followed in my final year by an independent study of the more obscure works of modern writers, primarily Fitzgerald and Cabell. By the end of my undergraduate work, I felt I had laid a reasonable foundation for later graduate work in modern American literature, and for my own efforts at creative writing.

There were many areas of study that I found enjoyable, but one that always fascinated me deeply was the use of mythic imagery in literature. I was drawn to the mythology of the Greeks, Romans, and particularly the Celts, and was deeply involved with tracing the many powerful and compelling mythic archetypes that have been woven throughout English literature in every period. I still find myself noting the appearance of mythic archetypes in the modern media, and for years have kept track of these appearances in notebooks.

Of course, having an Irish mother, I developed a love of words very early in life, and this has become an obsession now. The power of the word, and its changing nature in use, are subjects of continual fascination to me. I have a keen interest in etymology, the study of word origins, and keep notebooks of interesting word origins. I also enjoy studying various types of slang, and maintain a small library of slang dictionaries and notes on odd slang forms. Lately, I have discovered a whole new world of pidgin English forms used in undeveloped countries, and this ties in nicely with some new writing projects I am planning.

Finally, a knowledge of history is, of course, vital to any close study of literature. In college, I had the chance to read in European and American history, and I have continued to do so ever since. For many years now, I have studied the period from 1850 to 1900 in America, a fascinating era. I have often thought that the stories found in history books easily outshine anything in fiction. If you want amazing, exciting, wonderful stories, you need only read history!

Q: Were you ever involved in "radical" politics or culture? At what   age....?

Well, not really. I went to the Viet Nam moratoriums in '67, Chicago in '68, and the first big rock festivals here on the East Coast (Atlantic City and Woodstock), but like most of the kids there I was more interested in having sex and getting high than I was in making a political statement. I was hanging out with some of the cutest boys you've ever seen! I had nothing on my mind then but how to get this or that young man in bed the fastest way possible. All these were great events, at which I had memorable experiences, some frightening, some wonderful. But I didn't go to make any sort of political statement. I was young and all I cared about was having fun! I'm afraid that I really didn't even begin to think seriously about  politics until I was much older. By that time, I was too involved in academic work to do much else. The truth is, I didn't attend a demo for what I would call the "right" reasons until I became a member of ACT UP in the late 1980's. Sorry, but that's the sad truth.

Q: What was your goal when you went to Naropa Institute?

I was originally going to Boulder to do post-graduate work at the University there. The previous year, I had an idea that I might want to teach college one day, but that dream had faded rapidly during several months as an assistant to one of my professors. I found to my dismay that college students were as bad as high school students. The kids just didn't care, and few of them were there because they wanted to learn anything. It really pissed me off! So although I still intended to get my master's degree, by the time I left for Colorado, I was no longer sure exactly what I would do with it. As a result, I guess I was open to new possibilities.

I had traveled out west with a friend, Richard, and it was he that told me about Naropa. He said that the Rinpoche that ran the place (Chogyam Trungpa, the "Crazy Wisdom" Rinpoche) was a serious fan of the Beat writers, and had brought them all out to teach. I thought it sounded like a good way to get a better background in the modern Americans. I was especially happy to find that William S. Burroughs was going to give a class there on screenwriting. This was before Cities of the Red Night had been published. Bill's last major books had been Wild Boys! and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, both published several years before and both intensely interesting to me.

When I started classes at Naropa, it was my good luck to find Larry Fagin, God Bless him! He sort of took an interest in my work. He told me from early on that he thought I was good, that I could learn little from him and the other poets teaching there. He said, "Where you need to be is with William. You're writing stories here, not poetry. Bill's the one you should be talking to." Anne Waldman and Michael Brownstein gave similar advice: "Go see Bill." Well, of course, I wanted to show my work to Bill, such as there was of it. I supposed many students there did. But I didn't think I was ready, and kept resisting the suggestions. It was just too much pressure for me. I decided to attend Bill's class before I made up my mind about approaching him.

Q: How did that change when you met William [Burroughs]? What was your initial impression of William in class? In person?

The class was given about half way through the short summer term. Although I had seen many images of William, I have to say I was unprepared for the real thing when I went to his class. I was completely taken aback by the ancient power that emanated from him. William in person is something entirely different from his image. You can't always say that about everyone, but it was certainly true of Bill. He simply amazed me, and I found myself almost speechless (...a most unusual state for me, I can assure you!). I had the overwhelming impression of ancient wisdom. I realize now that I was seeing the sheer weight of the Ugly Spirit on him. The spirit he had carried for so long, the spirit that he had been trying to write his way out of since his wife Joan's death.

I was hardly conscious of what he said during the class. I was too  involved in watching his face, listening to the sound of his voice. I felt I was absorbing his words as one does the rays of the sun. When the hour was over, I realized that I had hardly taken any notes, and had spent the entire class just watching him. From what I can recall of the class, it was an informative discussion of Bill's efforts at writing screenplays.

He spoke in a low and monotonous voice primarily about Dutch Shultz, talking about the origin of the idea, about the process of turning the raw idea into visual scenes, and how the piece had been reworked many times. He talked about the problems of turning any piece of writing into a film. As a cautionary tale, he told an hilarious story about the doomed efforts to make Junky into a movie starring Dennis Hopper and with Terry Southern doing the screenplay. "Of course with the dubious Baron de Luc de Sterns de Rothschild, my dears, as our financial backer, the project sank quickly under the weight of numerous coke binges."

He talked at length about the cut up technique, going over the history of its development from Brion Gysin to himself, its position among other stream of consciousness styles, its relation to the visual media, and so forth. Then he said something that struck me as remarkable. He said that he felt he had more or less exhausted all the possibilities of the various cut up techniques. I thought I detected hints that he might be on the verge of a new approach to his writing, and it made me intensely curious to know more. I found him to be altogether a learned and careful scholar of his own works and writing techniques.

Some days later, I began to seriously consider approaching him. I felt it was important for me to meet him, though I didn't really fully understand why at the time. I had come back to my place after classes, a few blocks from the school, and Richard, with whom I shared the house, was already there. I said something about wanting to go meet Bill soon. Of course, he immediately started kidding me about it, saying I'd never go. It was early afternoon, and we were drinking tequila. The more we drank, the more he prodded me. Finally, stone drunk, I stood up, weaving, and slurred out, "Awright, dammit! I'll go, and right now, by God!" It was probably ten at night by then, but I got my portfolio and staggered out to Bill's apartment and knocked on the door.

He opened it almost at once, looked at me with a sour expression and said, "Oh, it's you!" I could tell he remembered me from class. I was unsure what to do next, but then he stood aside and said, "Well, come on in." He offered me a drink (just what I needed!) and I took it. He was drinking vodka, and poured a tumbler nearly full, topped it off with tonic, and pushed it across the kitchen table to me where I sat. I told him I'd come to show him my work. He accepted this and opened my portfolio. My heart sank as he flipped through my carefully typed stories about the criminals and drug addicts I had known, each page receiving but a cursory glance before being flipped over and forgotten. He went through the entire collection of some twenty stories in less than two minutes!

"Is that it?" he asked. I just sat there, stunned, saying nothing.

"Very nice," he said, and I could tell he thought no such thing. I supposed they seemed terribly amateurish, and I was completely humiliated. I was already thinking about the best way to get out of there politely when he said, "Let's go out on the porch."

He stepped out onto the small, railed porch through the glass door and looked over into the Varsity Apartments courtyard. In spite of the hour, most of the apartments were active and the courtyard was brightly lit. Across the way, we watched a young boy, perhaps fifteen, naked but for a swimsuit, climbing up and around the trellises that covered the inner walls of the courtyard. "That's Beade, Spence's kid," Bill murmured to me as we watched the youthful body pull and stretch up the wall. "Like a little monkey he is. Climbs all over the walls out here all the time. I never know when he's going to climb right up and stick his head through the window to say hi." I had to admit the boy was beautiful, and said so. Bill smiled at me in a way I came to know well later, the smile of a vaudeville showman, the smile of a gombeen man, and said, "Young boys do need it special!" He laughed and put a large, heavy hand on my shoulder, and suddenly I knew everything was going to be alright.

We spent the rest of that night talking and drinking. We talked about everything under the sun. I told him about my short life, and he told me about his youth in St. Louis and at the Los Alamos Boy's Ranch. Much later, sometime just before dawn, we went to sleep, him in his bed downstairs and me in the next room. The next morning I got up, made breakfast, and we talked some more. He told me that he had a companion named Steven Low, who I would meet. Steve had been hanging around with Bill for several years, and I could see that they loved each other. But Steve's life had begun to change lately, and he had things he needed to do. He was telling me, in his way, that Steve was not going to be around as much as used to be, and that there was a vacancy, a place for me, if I wanted it. I told him I did. I told him I would be proud to be his companion and helper, and that all I wanted from him was to learn from him, to learn the craft of writing from a master craftsman, however he was able to teach me. He thought this was a good arrangement, and we agreed I would stay. I never left from that day, and stayed with him for a total of five years.

I found an immediate rapport with Bill that was easy for us, and I saw for the first time that he was, in so many ways, a young man in an old man's body.. Being young, I naturally had several lovers, usually several at a time back then, but he never objected, as long as I did not bring them home. He took an easy going attitude toward me, and was never in any way possessive or jealous or vindictive, only kind, gentle, and open in all his dealings with me. I likewise took my lead from him. When he needed to be alone, I disappeared; when he wanted company, I was there. I had money from my family, and so I paid my own way in rent and other expenses, and never took money from Bill at any time. It was a perfect relationship in some ways, and we both certainly benefited from it.

Q: What themes or ideas were you focused on in your writing before meeting William? How did your relationship with William affect these interests? Did you focus on something new or did it reinforce old interests?

Well, as I said, before I met Bill, my stories were taken from a very small body of real life events, things that had actually happened to me in my younger years. These were basically crime stories told from the first person perspective. As such, they were severely limited in scope. Some were okay, most were not. What changed was that I no longer felt tied to writing about events that had actually occurred to me. After I began to work with Bill, I started to write stories about other eras, other times, other places. I researched these periods and places, of course, and much of my early work with Bill involved learning his special techniques of researching a story idea. These included the usual background reading, but also included visiting locations, focused dreaming, cut up experiments, and "walk-throughs." A walk-through was when Bill and I would act out a scene to see how things might go. I always had a lot of fun doing walk-throughs with Bill. This was during the early days of his work on Place of Dead Roads, which he called by it's working title Gay Gun. We'd drive out to visit sites of interest to him, places where events happened in the history of the west. There we would do short re-enactments of certain scenes, such as a gun fight, for example.

As you know, Bill believed all creative writing was basically autobiographical in nature, but he was not a fanatic about it. He felt you could apply your life experiences in many different ways. I learned from him to paint my stories with the sense and flavor and smells and feel of real life experiences, but not let my plots be limited only to events that had actually happened to me. My plots began to go farther afield, and the locations began to be imaginary, entirely of my own making. I learned to open my mind to the possibilities, while retaining the essence of my own real life experiences and using them to color my characters and their actions.

Another change that took place was an appreciation of history as a source of story ideas. Bill had finished "Cities of the Red Night" at this time, and I had the chance to read the material before the final edits were made. Throughout this marvelous book, he uses semi-historical elements and settings, and he even included one scene from the New York City Draft Riots at my urging. As you know, he based the idea for the book on Captain Mission 's 16th century pirate colony, a model of civic freedom and "Johnson man" tolerance that was far ahead of its time. This use of historical events as story ideas and elements is a form of time travel, I feel, and that is another gift I received from Bill: the key to this kind of imaginary time travel.

I would have to say that after meeting Bill, I focused on entirely new areas of interest in my writing. I completely reworked my entire approach. I have often felt, at key times in my life, that signs have appeared to show me that I was on the right course. Well, from my first day with Bill, all manner of signs continually indicated to me that this was where I was supposed to be. As a result I entirely abandoned everything I had done before, and I never once looked back. I don't know how else to describe the feeling, except to say that I just knew it was the right thing to do.

I learned from Bill all I could, while always being careful to delineate and develop my own style within the context of the techniques he showed me. Over the years, I think I can honestly say that I have succeeded in creating my own unique writing style, my own special take on Bill's teaching. My style now depends almost wholly upon a concise narrative, and my use of cut up is severely limited. In my work, cut ups are used to indicate extraordinary experiences: dreams, sex scenes, fights, complex action scenes like battles, and so forth. For me, the cut up is the most accurate way to describe the nature of thought, both conscious and unconscious, at times of stress, excitement, and contemplation.

Q: What do you find so interesting about the New York City Draft Riots and the youth gangs?

Now, this is a whole huge area, one I could talk about for hours! I consider this my primary historical period, 1850 to 1870, the period just before, during, and after the Civil War. It was a period of great change in all aspects of American life. Why, in just military technology alone, the period spans the entire fundamental changeover from the Napoleonic style of fighting to modern trench warfare! The Civil War period saw the development of all the major weapons of war we now use routinely: cartridge ammunition, high explosives, rifled canon, the sniper as a military weapon, submarines, torpedos, poison gas, trenches and wire, minefields, the battleship (and, by extension, the tank and other armored vehicles), the steam turbine... Oh, I could go on and on! It is one of the most fascinating periods in history, without question. It is also a period of great change in criminal life, the advent of the first truly organized criminal groups, and the consolidation and establishment of corruption as a major part of American political life. It is also the period during which the first major organized effort at racial genocide was attempted.

That is, in fact, what the Draft Riots were: a blatant attempt by the Protestant power structure in New York City to remove the poor Catholic Irish from the city. The Irish had flooded into the city to escape the famine that plagued their homeland during the 1840's and 50's, and most had stayed in New York. If not stopped, they threatened to become a political majority in the city. This was the first time the American people had faced a minority race problem, and they weren't dealing with it well. There was a lot of demonizing of the Irish and the Catholic Church, a lot of exclusion and prejudice. One commonly saw, scratched below any "Help Wanted" sign, the words, "No Irish Need Apply." Most Irishmen were out of work by 1860, and the few that did manage to stay employed were only allowed the most menial jobs as day laborers or servants.

In spite of these efforts to limit the influence of the Irish, the Irish stayed, and a few prospered, mostly through criminal enterprises. The Irish gangs soon began to dominate Lower Manhattan and the waterfronts, and this became yet another reason for the city fathers to seek a more drastic solution to the Irish problem, a final solution, as it were. By the time the Civil War had begun, they realized that their last best chance to drive the Irish from the city would be during the conflict on a pretense of national security. So they organized, with the full blessing of the Protestant Church, the Mayor, and the major business leaders of the city, to create an intolerable situation for the Irish, a situation in which they knew the Irish would riot.

It was a simple plan, really. They announced a lottery system for the Draft, and public drawings of the names starting in early July, 1863. It was the hottest summer on record that year, and the Irish turned out by the thousands to witness the drawings in the withering heat. They were already angered by the fact that the rich could purchase their exclusion from the Draft by paying a $300 fee to the government. With wages less than a dollar a day, such a figure was out of the question for them. If called, they must go, to serve a government that cared little for them, in a bloody conflict they had little stake in. Worse yet, they saw no good in fighting to free slaves who would then be available as cheap labor for the North. They knew the Blacks would work for far less, and quickly take away what few jobs they now had. This was the volatile situation as they assembled in the public squares of the old city to watch the lottery drawing.

When they began to pick the names from the squirrel cages, no one was really surprised to hear that all the names were Irish. But it was the last straw for the Irish. The spark ignited the fuel of a decade of oppression and hatred, and the huge body of unemployed Irish laborers rose as one and began to tear the city apart. This was, by coincidence, smack dab in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg, and most of the City's armed forces were a three day train ride away at the fight in the Pennsylvania hills. All that was available to stop the riot were a handful of police and armory guards, perhaps a few hundred, against twenty to thirty thousand howling insane rioters armed with clubs, knives, swords, bricks, and anything else they could find.

I'm sure you can well imagine how it went. It was a bloodbath! First they attacked the government buildings, setting fire to the Draft Offices, ransacking the police stations, post offices, and so forth. Police squads and militia units, hopelessly outnumbered, were overwhelmed and those who were caught by the mob were literally torn apart. Then the rioters turned their attention to the Negro residents of the city, attacking innocent passersby who happened to be Black, burning the Colored Orphan's Asylum, and throwing those who tried to escape back into the flames. The atrocities committed were utterly horrific, unlike anything ever seen in the US before. At one point, the trees of Washington Square Park were festooned with hundreds of bodies of unfortunate Blacks who had been caught and lynched, their bodies then burned where they hung. It was variously described by reporters at the time as "a vision of hell" and "as if something evil had possessed the city." Indeed, something evil <had> possessed the city: the unholy rage of the black Irish.

This sort of thing went on virtually unchecked for three full days until the troops finally returned from the Gettysburg front. Surprisingly, even though the damage was terrible and many were killed, the total deaths up to this point were estimated at well under 1,000, with approximately 2,000 severely wounded. But with the arrival of troops and artillery, the carnage truly began. The excesses of the Rioters were all the excuse the government ever needed to order a systematic extermination campaign for the Irish in the city. Horace Greeley, a journalist close to the inner circle of New York government, gleefully wrote that week in the Herald Tribune, "Give them grape and plenty of it!" Of course, he was referring to grape shot, a term for several hundred ten ounce lead balls poured into a canon over-loaded with black powder, and leveled at the crowd from about thirty feet away. When detonated, each round of grape shot cut a swath of human destruction ten men across and five men deep. Some 1200 of these charges were used on the crowds of rioters over the next two days, with concentrated rifle fire from battalions of battle hardened troops. At one point, the bodies covered Sixth Avenue from side to side from 23rd street all the way down to the Battery. The papers reported only 5,000 killed during those last two days, but the true figure is undoubtedly much larger. Needless to say, the Riots came to an abrupt end.

The plan admirably achieved its purpose. The power of the Catholic Irish was effectively broken, not to recover for nearly a full century. Those who weren't killed were forced to move out of the city, to Texas and points west. Some became legendary outlaws like Billy the Kid and John Wesley Harding. Others became successful businessmen over the next fifty years. The rioters had largely confined their damage to the public buildings uptown and to their own neighborhoods below 23rd Street. The public buildings were simply rebuilt, usually larger. The Irish-owned properties in Lower Manhattan were confiscated using false deeds forged by elements of the Mayor's office, and these were enforced by thugs from certain Irish gangs that had played an important role in the conflict. These lands were eventually cleared and became the sites of huge tenements that were erected to house the cheap Black labor that flooded New York after the Civil War. These tenements were rebuilt and enlarged every few decades over the next century, and still stand to this day on the old waterfront stomping grounds of the Irish gangs in Lower Manhattan. As wave after wave of immigrants have come to New York since those days, they are consigned by the government to these loathsome tenements and forgotten. All in all it was a very successful operation, with many benefits achieved at relatively little cost.

An interesting legacy of the Draft Riots is the popular image of the lovable old Irish cop. We all know this image: the fat, red-cheeked cop that takes an apple from the local fruit stand and doesn't pay. Free food for policemen is a tradition that still lingers on in a few restaurants and groceries in New York City. But where did it come from? I'll tell you: There were a number of Irish Catholics that were members of gangs that were quietly in the pay of certain people at City Hall. These gang members got the assignment to betray their fellow Irishmen, by leading the mobs of rioters into certain death at the hands of waiting squads of militia during the final days of the Riots. They took to their job with gusto, and were successful. Their reward was to be inducted en masse into the New York City Police Department, where they became the majority of the active duty officers during that period. Many of their male (and now female) ancestors remain on the force to this day.

Before these worthies were "civilized" by serving many years on the police force, they commonly continued their criminal activities while on duty at their new jobs! These gang members worked the protection racket as a primary source of income. This naturally lent itself well to their new position as upstanding representatives of the police force. Under the new aegis of the police, the protection rackets were expanded this to cover the entire city. And this is where the image of the cop taking his token cut of an apple from the grocers table originated. Nice little bedtime story, no? Just one of many...

Now, you ask about the gangs of old New York. During the period 1830 to 1860 the Irish gangs flourished, with a few holding on as long as the 1890's. These gangs and the stories that have come down to us about them are a marvelous study in the complexities of criminal enterprise, a study that could easily make a life's work all by itself. I am principally interested in the gangs for two basic reasons. The first is that the Irish gangs were the first inklings of a truly organized criminal society in America, and as such are indeed historically significant. They are also interesting as a revelation of the irrepressible Irish character, for like the Italians after them, the Irish were shunned and excluded from regular legal businesses, and fought back largely through these organized criminal enterprises until they could establish legitimate means of business.

The second reason I am so interested in the gangs of New York is the similarity of the gang member's existence to elements in certain of Bill's books, particularly Wild Boys! and Cities of the Red Night. I saw, especially in the ill-stared history of the Daybreak Boys, an atmosphere that was ideal as a setting for my approach to the Draft Riots stories.

My first conception of the Draft Riots book was a rather complex plot based on the adventures of a surviving member of the Daybreak Boys, who were wiped out in 1857. He goes on to take a key role in the 1863 Riots and survives to go out west at the end of the book. The current plot is considerably simpler, of course, but parallels to Wild Boys! And Cities still exist and are obvious to any reader. I continue to do research on the gangs of New York from 1850-1870, and add regularly to the body of work that I now call simply Riot! I am currently playing with the idea of setting a substantial part of the narrative in a New York City of the distant future, with characters and plot lines shared between the two times, sort of a science fiction treatment, if you will. At present, the material totals some several hundreds of pages in rough draft, with a number of closely related short stories running from two to twenty-five pages each.

Copyright held by Das Romanie Booksellers, 1999
Reference: Spoken Word Festival Stockholm 1999