William Burroughs: Return of the Invisible Man

”So you bought another piece, Mr. B.?”

”Naaaw,” says Burroughs. He’s loading the chamber of an old Colt .41 Peacemaker. ”This is my brother’s gun. He died. My nieces sent this to me. They sent me the ammo, too. That was very thoughtful.”

It’s a hot day in Kansas and very still. High green corn and bright sun. Just to move is to sweat. William S. Burroughs, his flat Midwestern drawl hanging in the heat, is talking to one of his new Kansas friends, Fred Aldrich. We’re at Fred’s place, a steel-and-concrete warehouse fifteen miles outside of Lawrence that is fenced off with high wire mesh. ”A little like Rhodesia,” says Burroughs. On the way over, Burroughs and I stopped off at Lawrence Pawn Shop and Shooters Supplies – where Burroughs’s literary fame has not penetrated – to buy targets, which are now pinned against a board amid the Kansas foliage.

On a rotting wooden table under a tree, Burroughs has laid out a selection from his extensive arsenal, including a 1911 Colt .45 automatic (”the best handgun ever made”) and his double-action ”house gun,” which he keeps under the coverlet of his bed. Fred has countered with a few of his own favorites: a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum with an eight-inch barrel, the second-biggest mass-produced handgun you can buy in America; a Colt Python; and an Austrian Army-issue Glock.

”Did you see Firepower this month, Mr. B.?” Fred asks. He is walking in the yard in his Levi’s, stripped to the waist. He is tall, good-looking, around 35, with a freckled, ginger complexion. He goes over to the garage door of the warehouse and swings it up. You see, in linear progression, a 1972 Buick Centurion convertible, a speedboat that will do 75 mph, a Honda 650-cc. turbocharged motorcycle and Fred’s 22-year-old girlfriend, Tammy, in a bikini Hoovering the carpet in the living area beyond, a cigarette dangling from her lips. On the left are shelves of Chinese antiques, samples from Fred’s lucrative import business. Above a large bed are racks of loaded shotguns. And in the far right-hand corner is a door that conceals Burroughs’s nemesis – Fred’s German-shepherd attack dog.

Burroughs, who has developed an obsession with animals – a major theme of his new fiction – hates dogs. And horses, too, with ”their awful yellow teeth.” He likes cats and lemurs. He had warned me about Fred’s dog on the drive out from Lawrence. ”That thing could kill you in seconds,” he said. Once, when Fred left the door ajar, it flew at a fireman who had come to the wrong address and locked onto one of his testicles before Fred could shout. ”Very lucky to get away with that,” Burroughs growled. ”Another time he tried to jump through a window when a plumber was working on the house. Another time he broke his chain and killed a possum. I never say anything to Fred. It’s a sore point. He loves this beast. First thing I do when I get out there is get a gun on my hip. Fred would never forgive me, of course.”

As we smoke and drink vodka and Coke in the cool warehouse while revving up for a second round of target practice, I ask Tammy if the dog can come and sit with us. ”No way,” she says, cheerily shaking her head. When Tammy first arrived in Fred’s life, the dog had to be chained up in her presence for many days. As Fred goes into the dog’s lair to get a new West German assault rifle for our inspection, Burroughs cranes his head backward, fixes his gaunt expression on the door and mumbles to himself, ”Holy shit.”

For the rest of our stay at Fred’s, the insect drone of the afternoon is split by the blast of gunfire. Burroughs is a pretty fair shot, his bullets often nicking the ten-point bull’s-eye. His arms are stretched rigidly in front of him, bulbous sound mufflers covering his ears. But Fred’s .44 Magnum is almost too much for the frail, 72-year-old figure, and his feet shuffle backward for balance as the huge charge explodes in the chamber.

If you know only two things about William Burroughs, one is that he shot and killed his wife, Joan, with a handgun on a gloomy day in Mexico City in 1951 as they acted out a William Tell routine in front of friends, a cocktail glass replacing the apple on her head.

The other is that he wrote Naked Lunch, published in America in 1962, a semiautobiographical portrayal of the horrors of heroin addiction and withdrawal turned into a metaphor for humanity victimized by addiction to money, power and sex. It was a black satire, full of brilliant, comic routines using pulp-fiction characters and pop images and deliberately without plot and structure. Mary McCarthy wrote a famous review in which she compared Burroughs to Jonathan Swift (”There are many points of comparison; not only the obsession with excrement and the horror of female genitalia but a disgust with politics and the whole body politic”). Norman Mailer said that it was conceivable Burroughs was possessed by genius and that he was possibly the most talented writer in America – comments his publishers use to the point of embarrassment in promoting his books.