Ten years later – touring the West coast and while playing the Hotel Utah in San Francisco, Elliot shows up. He had become a new age breath therapy guru. I don’t recall the name of his practice or his method but he was excited to share with me his new accomplishments, invited me to have a free session at his office located in a funkier part of San Francisco which previous shows never took me too. We sat in a circle, me and some others, I thought Selina was with me but recently I asked her about it and she didn’t recall. They instructed us to breath in and out quickly, to hyperventilate. This went on longer than a person ordinarily experiments then something crazy happened, my arms and legs ached and contracted. It was all involuntary but I felt trustworthy about this crazy thing we were all doing, simultaneously painful and exhilarating. There were two people who worked for him who helped me and whoever else that experienced spasms, they just massaged the arm or leg, it was euphoric. It came back to me while reading Burroughs accounts of other low life people in the Heroin and misc. drug culture he embraced as his life then. In fact it makes me think being stuck as an addict, that his creative solution, a gamble really, toward recovering from all that, was to try writing his way out but not sparing details no matter who might take offense. Like Guy Maddin, forty years later in My Winnipeg “this time I’m gonna film my way outta here”. It was unlike anything I experienced, even up to today still wondering what happened that night and what that breath therapy was all about. Haven’t heard of it since or of Elliot and can’t remember his last name except it started with an N. My friend who hated him, Dennis, who was so offended by everything about Burroughs, left me with the impression that despising him had to do with what he represented which also left me curious about the friends of Burroughs like Laurie Anderson, John Giorno and Patti Smith, fierce defenders of him and his work. I made that classic mistake of pointing this out to Dennis, he wasn’t interested in anything other than his own opinions. Not the first time I get into pointless fights with people dismissing Yoko or Dylan or Jarrett. Pointless as the people who dismissed my friend at the fringe festivals who they said wanted attention not for humanity but her vanity. I piss off everyone in the class each time I say you can’t teach anything just using words, as they do in academia. That’s another thing I like quite a lot about Burroughs, he said language itself was from outer space.