From
(Grove Press, 1967)
Excerpt begins on page 240:
I had heard the name Bill India once or twice before, and remembered nothing in connection with it but that he was thought to be strange. I vaguely knew he was one of the Street People, urban gypsies who never have pads of their own, but move from place to place, bartering their arts and dark glamour for a couch to sleep on, and invariably being turned out for stealing or destroying their host's property. Either they are turned out or their host becomes a ghoul like them, soon to be evicted himself by an outraged landlord who has called the police. Trocchi discovered and befriended him, and made him Vizier of his life and pad, and that Vizier more or less invented Trocchi's pad, though I did not know it the night of my visit, Trocchi mentioning Bill India only as a friend expected later.
Trocchi gave Bill India a freer reign than he had ever had before, and nourished and abetted his excesses -- Trocchi's bent had always been editing -- but to his own pad he himself retained the key, and so Bill India flowered yet not fully. After Trocchi's pad went up in flames, I saw a succession of apartments in which Bill India was the nominal guest, and I saw his hold over each successive host tighten, as he came into his own, and I saw the final apartment (he rented himself) by candlelight, during a flash raid we conducted to liberate one of his captives -- and that pad he ruled absolutely, like a sachem or potentate, in the most unearthly opulence mind can imagine.
I remember him best sitting cross-legged in the opal cloud of his possessions, his fingers working so busily you couldn't take your eyes off or quite figure out what he was doing -- scraping, cutting, painting, tearing, gluing, especially smudging over anything printed clear and decisively, with his fingers always stained and sticky with his glues and inks and lacquers, wrapping tiny boxes in fur swatches, winding red threads around wand-like amulets, cooking up horse in a brass bottle cap over a candle, probing for a vein or wiping off a drop of blood with what looked like a penwiper, running a wire back and forth through a hypodermic needle, fingering the holes of his flute but not blowing it, or nervously flipping through the pages of the Fifth Book of Roses, his mind no doubt filled with the hexing of a black cat he hated. The floor about him was scattered with dozens of little objects of art and the tools of his trade: pens, pencils, and bamboo ink brushes, idols and amulets -- many garnished with colored threads and feathers -- of what seemed to be every cult and religion known to mankind, tiny boxes and bottles of drugs and dry inks, cowhorns and crystals, rat-tail files and long-nosed pliers, wrenches and sets of hypodermic needles -- with which he sprayed and injected his cloths and leathers with dyes --, glass straws and a kid bag of semi-precious stones stolen right out of people's rings, dissecting probes and dental instruments, a shepherd's flute banded with copper, a dried-out kitten, three spirals of lavender incense from which great pillars of smoke rose almost unwavering, a tall gilded Buddha, a brass doorknob, an oarlock, perhaps a pound of colored candle stubs, some burning, some not, and finally a half-empty khaki knapsack, into which he could make this cloud of objects disappear in a twinkling, and from which, swung lightly with one hand from his back to the floor, he could set up shop anywhere. Each fetish had a respective ritual: a certain way of being wrapped or unwrapped in its own piece of cloth or soft kidskin, with its own string tied in certain ways and knotted in certain places: a certain order in which each was taken from the knapsack and replaced: a certain position each one occupied in the circle of objects around him: a certain formula muttered as each Kwannon, Ganesh, or Three Wise Monkeys was set upright, prone, or propped up by a spool.
His aesthetic arrogance was total. He believed that beautiful things were more properly his than anyone else's, that his prior right to them was self-evident, and so he appropriated whatever book, spoon, or scarf he fancied, when its owner's back was turned. He quickly tired of most things and would transform them into whatever he pleased, blackening silver, cutting the gilt off book edges, painting over expensive reproductions of Goyas, Bosches, and so on. His objects vanished as rapidly as they were acquired, some he gave away outright (though never to people outside his entourage except to ensnare them), some he sold to fences or to the slummers he occasionally ran into, but most found their way into the jealous fingers of his friends and emulators, which were as light as his. A high turnover of objects took place among this group, and it was possible to come across the same broken xylophone, on successive nights, in successive hands in different parts of the city. For him the beauty of an object comprised much more than its physical form, and he often stole things which were dull or badly designed if he sensed that they were prized by their owners. He never questioned his prior right to whatever anyone held precious. Like Professor X, he was hypergullible to whatever anyone let on they adored, and it was possible to get rid of an ugly knick-knack by handling it idly in Bill India's presence. You could be sure he would never steal or accept what you offered him outright.
I used to have a kitten pillow I took everywhere I went. I took it to Vermont, where I spent some time trying to cure the Poet with sex and housekeeping. He made the bed every morning and plumped up the pillows, and every night before climbing under the furs I placed my kitten pillow high on the others to sleep on. I took that pillow wherever I went, from the bed to an armchair I sat in, and out when I went for a walk. One night before bedtime I quarrelled with the Poet and stalked outside to cool off, forgetting my pillow. When I returned he was asleep -- on his side of the bed -- but with his torso aslant so his head could rest on the pillow -- pressing down extra-hard on it, even though he was sleeping. Was it love or soaking up my magic power? I told this story to a friend. It brought tears to his eyes, even though, he later told me, he was hurt I did not ask him what he thought the Poet's act had meant. That pillow looked cuddly, but was hard and harsh to the touch -- harsher than the touch of coral. When I was with others I nuzzled and stroked it, loving and childlike, but when I was alone I kicked it into the closet. So many people these days try to hurt us by stealing or attacking whatever they think we hold precious, it pays to drag around a red herring.
Bill India was guilty of the most appalling malpractice and breach of professional ethics in the annals of fat black medical history. In plain English, he put his vast beauty-garnering apparatus entirely in the service of evil. His heart's desire was to spread misery and suffering wherever he could, to plunder anything precious, and to smother any flame he saw kindling in souls. His hatred for anything human was the fount of his art and life. His art was compulsive and so in that sense true and even superb, but the compulsion came from a realization fit to be made by the Black One himself -- that the road to reach souls Heavenward flaming is beauty alone. Bill India's sights were monstrously high. And all through that long war my cohorts and I knew we were wrestling not with flesh and blood, but with Principalities and Powers. Any one of Bill India's objects had the look of a trout-fly about it.
The roots of beauty are sunk in meanness and despair as everyone knows, and the more stinkingly black the mulch, the more orange and burning the sunflower. Evil lengthens the runway for the jet plane of beauty to race on before it can rise. O give beauty the gun! Thus evil is yoked in the service of art, and the poet a powerful magician indeed, that he sits on Satan's neck. And everyone knows that beauty is a living and breathing. It makes us gasp. It fills us with light. It lasts for many lifetimes. It keeps what is tender from dying. It is stronger than steel and towers. It is moonlight on a lonely field, and a strong familiar pressure. You pull open your pants in the moonlight and sink to your knees. O touch the coolth and sleeping peaceful world in the only way ye know how! Evil is the root and not the fleshy flower.
The Street People came to be dubbed the Amphetamine People, and there is no question that their arts and habits were in a large part the effects of this drug. Amphetamine is thought to be a chemodepressor of the evil-inhibitory centers in the medulla oblongata.
Yes, Bill India could come on as charming and boyish as you please, his eyes filled with innocent mischief, "Aw shucks my uncle Teddy gave me a wizard set for Christmas and I done practiced up a few tricks to show you, say you know where I can buy a baby rabbit?" But he practiced black magic and prayed to the Devil.
At first you scoffed at the magic he purported to know, for when he blew up at one of his confederates he would rush to a book, throw it open and flip through its pages muttering, as if he were searching for the formula of an especially drastic curse, but though you heard plenty of threats and unbelievably foul language, you would never actually witness the laying of a curse. Then too he used to carry tomes of ancient lore around with him like Kathy Pleune used to carry the classics of literature, not to read but as a badge of identity. It was almost comical to watch him show off that succession of books -- a history of witchcraft or journal of psychic research, the Zohar, Book of Changes, Diamond Sutra, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, Isis Revealed or the American Ephemeris -- and pretend he was steeping himself in magical wisdom, when I knew he just looked at the pictures. But, just as Kathy Pleune had the finest native literary sensibility I ever came across in a female, and she was only sixteen, at least the possibility existed that alongside all of Bill India's patent posing and hocus-pocus -- and even using it to hide behind -- a soul did exist which could throw a mean curse if it wanted.
And so in spite of your telling yourself that Bill India was just a good showman, in spite of your natural skepticism, in spite of your devotion to the natural sciences, in spite of your life-long struggle and victory over your suggestibility, in spite of Bill India's open admission that his magic worked only on people who believed in it to begin with, you could feel yourself falling. And besides deluging you with hints of his vast arcane resources and the visual reality of his symbols and rituals, he was quick to exploit anything that happened to you in your daily life, good or bad -- the arrival of your income tax refund or the death of a friend --, by implying he had brought it about for a specific plausible reason, which he was reluctant to divulge. Slowly and subtly he suggested that your life was under his influence. And no sooner did you half-believe in his magic than it started tormenting you.
You could always tell if Bill India had ever been in a room you entered, because if he had, there was sure to be an aleph or a lamed painted in blue or black or silver, on the back of a door or inside a phonograph, or the sign of Aries or Libra on the wall above a mirror, or you are suddenly facing the ideogram chien (obstruction) when you sit down on the toilet. Trocchi's pad and the ones that followed it were filled with these devices, as if a recalcitrant young djinn at the table had hurled, through the several apartments, a ladle of Occult Alphabet soup. A tiny aleph on your bedroom wall becomes an India henchman. It will not let you ignore it nor think of it as a pretty design, as at first. It writhes. It invites you to suffer with it opulently.
He saw himself as a kind of fallen angel, in light moods as a naughty Loki, and in black moods as the Prince of Light himself. Either way he felt himself committed to mischief and malevolence, and he did all he could to increase the horror and confusion of the people around him. His aims or rather targets were lofty, and his dedication truly epic. Let the centuries know a great black prince passed here.
