Booksology The Bunker Diaries by Stewart Meyer (Beatdom Books, 2025)
By Oliver Harris
THE BUNKER DIARIES is one of those books that all you have to do is hold it in your hands, and it just reads itself. Although this also hints at its limitations, I mean that as a compliment to the lively pacing of the prose and the inherent interest of the people, the place and period it documents – the Lower East Side of the late 1970s to early 1980s – and its focus on the overlapping circles of writing and drug-taking.
But I should begin by declaring an interest. That’s because Stewart Meyer’s book ends almost exactly where I came in, so that I can’t help but see it all overlaid with sepia- tinted memories of the first steps in my 40 years spent stalking William Burroughs. By the time I got to the Bowery in October 1984 as a fresh-faced PhD student, Burroughs had already gone, relocated to Lawrence, Kansas, which is where we met the following month.
Feeling conspicuous in my vintage suit and tie, I walked briskly by 222 and past the suspicious eyes of the Skid Row bums, not risking my camera to even take a shot of the door. In any case, I had read Victor Bockris’ recent book – A Report from the Bunker (1981) – and dismissed the scene there as no more than celebrity dinner table talk which wasn’t going to help my thesis.
When I wasn’t researching manuscripts in the Columbia University archives, I paid homage to the original New York Beat scene, which was less down in the East Village and more uptown around Columbia. At 103rd and Broadway, I tried to spot William Lee waiting for his connection on a corner with his coat collar turned up and the brim of his fedora snapped down low.
I was looking for ghosts in daylight and a mythical Manhattan of the 1940s. When I met up with Herbert Huncke, I asked him about that past, not the present. I had, in short, no idea of what was actually going on around me. Wandering through Alphabet City, for all I know I might have walked right past Stewart Meyer scoring his ‘Black Sunday’ or ‘Dr Nova’. I didn’t know what street smarts even were, let alone have any.
If I labour the point, it’s because the scene described by Meyer in his novel The Lotus Crew, which was published the year I arrived and which Burroughs blurbed as ‘a vivid picture of the new junk underworld’, meant nothing to me. I wasn’t much interested in bags of powder or even books about bags of powder.
It’s one of the sly jokes of Junky that Burroughs’ narrator tells us exactly how and where to score, as if that’s what we’re after, when obviously it’s not. That book may pass itself off as realist reportage of the ‘old underworld’ but it reveals Burroughs’ insidious ability to mirror back the reader’s voyeuristic hypocrisy, the blind spots and contradictions in our desire.
Pictured above: Book cover featuring Stewart Meyer with William Burroughs
That’s why you can keep re-reading Junky, and in fact need to re-read it, whereas with The Lotus Crew – and indeed The Bunker Diaries – you just go straight through. Meyer’s authenticity and ear for the street is entirely convincing, but, when he compares the quality of the hard stuff sold by the Green Tape crew or the Red Line crew (which ‘can be smokin’ in the morning and bullshit in the afternoon’), that’s all it is: authentic.
The literary comparison isn’t fair on Meyer, of course, and he is modest enough never to compete. He knows his place, knows that he scored the best shit of his life just by being in the right place at the right time, which was in the Bunker with William Burroughs.
The diary that ends in 1984 with publication of The Lotus Crew begins a decade earlier in 1974 with a star-struck Meyer listening to Burroughs deliver a class on F. Scott Fitzgerald at the City College and afterwards giving him a lift back to the Bunker in his VW Beetle, toking all the way on Meyer’s ‘very fine Thai bush’.
We’ll hear a lot more about that Thai bush as well as a variety of opiates on almost every page, because they’re central to Meyer’s fantasy of finding in the Bunker a kind of European literary salon, a Manhattan version of the Club des Hashischins where Baudelaire and Balzac smoked in nineteenth-century Paris.
Other writers pop into the ‘magical context’ of 222 Bowery, with regular visits from John Giorno and Allen Ginsberg in particular, but what separates The Bunker Diaries from A Report from the Bunker is less the conversations than Meyer’s very different presence and personality.
Above all, he’s there as the magician’s apprentice, and the thread that holds his entries together is the slow progress of his own halting efforts to write under Burroughs’ tutelage.
The Master drops a few pearls of pragmatic wisdom, which Meyer dutifully records, although he seems not to notice that Burroughs’ best advice is not about writing but about drugs – like, ‘Never fix in the evening when you don’t have to. It only fucks up your morning glory’ – or that the turning point in his efforts comes about not thanks to Burroughs at all, but to a blast from his past in the shape of Jacques Stern.
Then again, Stern’s support is not actually to do with writing either; he just secures for Meyer a solid source from a Dr Feelgood character to feed his habit so that he doesn’t have to waste his time and take risks scoring on the street.
There’s a comic scene at one point involving Ginsberg, who can’t handle the reefers of strong pot the size of cigars, when he asks aloud what the reader must have been asking themselves all along: ‘How do you get any work done?’ Meyer doesn’t seem to know either: ‘I shrugged. It was a valid question.’
It is a testament to Burroughs’ remarkable constitution and self-discipline, as well as his talent, that he manages to be productive during this period. That’s the backdrop to Meyer’s own painful writing progress, although he also has to juggle everyday life –relationships, a full-time job, and scoring his dope – whereas Burroughs can leave his chores to James Grauerholz, and, indeed, to Meyer.
Like Ginsberg, Meyer can only marvel at Burroughs’ stamina, which applies to alcohol as well as the hard stuff: ‘Man, these cats could drink,’ he reflects during an evening with Ted Morgan. On Burroughs, opium has the effect of ‘a vitamin complex,’ he notes.
During a difficult evening with Ginsberg – often a tetchy character here, the butt of Burroughs’ humour (‘Bill’s putting me on. He’s been doing that for my entire adult life’) – Meyer reminds himself of his purpose in life: ‘I was there because I needed to watch William’s material go from his head to the page and from draft to draft. Everything else was just a distraction.’
For me, one of the disappointments of The Bunker Diaries, is that it’s the distractions which dominate. When Meyer follows Burroughs to Kansas to type onto a computer early drafts of The Place of Dead Roads, he observes: ‘My typing speed is legendary and I knew what a Burroughs page should read like.’
Apart from learning that he went to work on a reefer and produced 25 clean pages a day, this is all we find out about the stages of Burroughs’ creative process. In that context, other details become annoying. We’re told– at least three times – that Burroughs doesn’t eat his greens and likes to cut the centres out of lamb chops, for example.
I’m not sure if the repetition is a result of lapses in editing (we’re not told if or how the diary entries have been edited), or a reminder of just how repetitive ordinary life is, whether or not you’re an addict, or for that matter, William Burroughs.
On the other hand, for most readers I suspect the distractions will more than satisfy. Whether about Bertolt Brecht or Kenneth Anger, the conversations Meyer records are highly entertaining. Herbert Huncke turns up and delivers every time, always fabulous value despite his brazen hustling. (For our meeting in 1984, he took me for a 6-pack of beer and in return gave back several hours of entertaining anecdotes as well as limited-edition copies of small press pamphlets he had swiped).
My other disappointment is that some of the landmark events of this era remain out of focus: for example, the Nova Convention of 1978 was a major event in Burroughs’ relaunch in the US, but the main thing to come out of it in Meyer’s diary is the bitchy cold shoulder given him by Brion Gysin. (It’s possible he’s being diplomatic here, glossing over Gysin’s jealousy at all the attention afforded to Burroughs, sharpened by his being a late invitation to the Nova party).
There are brief references to the writing of Cities of the Red Night and the assembly and publication of Huncke’s Guilty of Everything, and to the death of Billy Burroughs after his liver transplant (Burroughs becomes ‘melancholy but not distant’), while Victor Bockris at work on his book of interviews pops in and out, as does Howard Brookner, shooting his documentary.
In fact, one of the best scenes in The Bunker Diaries is the hilarious account of Meyer acting for Brookner with Burroughs as Dr Benway and Jackie Curtis as the nurse. The Warhol Superstar would be dead from an overdose by 1985, however: a reminder, were it needed, that, in combining addiction with art, William Burroughs – and to a lesser but creditable extent Stewart Meyer, still going into his later 70s – triumphed against the odds.
Editor’s note: Oliver Harris is a distinguished commentator on the life and works of William S. Burroughs. He is Professor Emeritus in American Literature at the University of Keele in the UK
See also: ‘Queer thinking: Harris’ movie takes’, January 16th, 2025
