by Eurydice (c) 1999

IN MEMORIAM TO BILL BURROUGHS:

Sexiest American Prose Writer

William Burroughs is a literary and scientific unsolved mystery. Burroughs was the quintessential 20th century American and his passing, more than anything that has happened, marks the end of the century. In short, Burroughs was: a literary genius; a cowboy; a gentleman; a family man; an inventor; a conspiracy expert; a political activist; a drug addict; a murderer; a paranoid; a brave fag; the quintessential trailblazer-lawbreaker-WASP. At heart, he was a scientist of the Einstein type, an American pioneer. What he did best was to experiment. And everything about him, impeccable as it was, seems to have been an accident. Like a big bang, or the first cell that imploded in two, trillions of years back, or the course of a comet. He personified chaos theory. The trajectory of his life from St. Louis (grandson of the inventor of the adding machine and founder of the Burroughs Corporation) to Harvard (English and archaeology) to New York (heroin and father of the Columbia Univ. Beats) to East Texas (farmer, kids) to Mexico (the William Tell routine during which he kills his wife Joan Vollmer Adams, aiming to shoot a glass off her head) to Tangiers (writing his way out of madness in mountains of manuscripts that became Naked Lunch) to Paris (cut-ups and notoriety) to Kansas City (fortressed in, communicating with the world through videoconferencing and Nike commercials) is enough to earn him a citation in any encyclopedia. But the greatest mystery is: where did the literary masterpieces come from? He was the last American writer to be convincingly touched by the Muse. I have known many writers, including Allen Ginsberg who passed away so eerily close to Bill, and most of them are complex and interesting and borderline mad, but none is remotely as complex and interesting and mad as Burroughs. I met him in 1986 as a student at Naropa, when he was already flanked by his gun-toting Mormon butlers-cum-bodyguards. He was always immaculately dressed in grayish suit and tie and polished shoes, well-creased, well-mannered and well-spoken, his anachronistic elegance shockingly otherworldly in the Naropa hippie-haven, where Ginsberg was leading naked workshops in the hot-tub and no one went unseduced. My English lit professor at C.U. had just told our graduate class an apocryphal story he had on good authority about the one time Burroughs met Beckett in Paris (on the way to or from a cafe, as the two passed a dark alley, Burroughs unceremoniously took out a .22 and shot down a bag-lady who was rummaging through a garbage can, terrifying Beckett to silence), and I expected to meet a combination Ted Kazynski-Charles Manson. He was more like a Puritan Bishop. On the first day, when he was to lecture about collage, he brought a microscope-like device in class for which he had just bought the patent, and explained that it was a wishing machine: when it was perfected, the consumer would be able to place a photograph under the nose of the wishing-scope, make a wish, and have it come true for the person or place on the photograph. After months of experiments he had succeeded in wishing the pimples removed from his neighbor's teenage daughter's face, he explained, but the possibilities ahead were endless. "This instrument can make guns obsolete," he commanded in his late-40s' chirp. "It can change the course of history. Anyone who owns this can wish his enemies dead, his mother mute, his house enlarged." He was serious enough to enlist some of us to work on it for the course, and we did for a week or two, flattered that Bill had recognized the mystics-alchemists in us (whether of word or machine should make no difference); we brainstormed and reported our ideas to him irregularly and got credit. He never read our writing, but he taught us a hell of a lot about writing by this method. And one of us may still perfect the wishing machine yet.