Burroughs: The Movie

     I was a junior at a midwestern public university in 1986.  That year, I tagged along on a road trip to Dallas, with some people I knew to see a reading at a place called the Caravan of Dreams.  The author was William S. Burroughs.  Knowing nothing about him, my memories of the reading are at the end, when audience members were lined up for autographs.  One young woman let out a "Woo!"  I was mesmerized my the admiration for this author.  A guy with his leg in a cast stood aside of Burroughs and asked him if he didn't "have anything nice to say?"  What a goofball.  One of the people I came with (and who knew the guy putting on the event) asked this heckler (and who heckles an autograph signing?) if he wanted him to break his other leg, his arm...  The guy who put on the reading said to the burnout, "He's not a nice guy."  There's something odd about a situation such as this, happening in a decade such as the 1980s.  What had William Burroughs become to those willing to waylay a dumb guy in a cast?
     Back at school, someone I knew on the school newspaper asked me to write a review of the the author's performance.  I don't remember if anyone knew...that I was unaware of William Burroughs' legacy, or even that he was a Beat.  So I wrote this.  What he does is...make ex-hippies laugh.  Every other word that came out of this...guy's mouth was "fart" and "s---" and "a------" and "f---."  The ex-hippies really dug  Wailing Willie.  I mentioned his shoes.  I described one fan taking a photo with Mr. Burroughs as a dork with an obnoxious hat and cheesy moustache...  (Didn't I have anything nice to say?)  Sounds like me, but my uninformed perspective was so out of tune, it's delicious.  If the campus newspaper received any death threats, they never mentioned to me.  The reaction to my review showed me that, if nothing else, this author most likely had much less in common with Willie Nelson that I thought.
     And I haven't seen Willie Nelson live either.  A decade later, I would enjoy the film version of Naked Lunch.  Regardless, none of this came to mind when I went to see Burroughs: The Movie, a one-time screening in town.  At the beginning of the film, Burroughs describes the places where he is holding readings as "punk rock clubs."  It follows him on a trip back to a St. Louis suburb of his childhood.  Joining him on this stroll, on a beautiful day, is his personal assistant and significant other.  Together with Burroughs' other friends, this guy strikes me as an odd man out in his sock tie and slacks, the aloof way he talks about feeling like Burroughs' son.  We see Burroughs with his older brother on wire chairs surrounded by the green of a garden.  The physical difference is striking.  His older brother sitting next to him appears somehow ten years younger, filled out, healthy.  Out from under the spotlight, Burroughs looks gaunt, frail.  The way he hangs on tight to family photos the pair are looking at, he almost looks timid.  Out front of his parents' old home, he remembers learning to "call frogs."  St. Louis amused him, but he says that the social life would not have allowed him to live there.  Yet more than one of his friends in the film describe his decency, with an original fellow Beat telling us that he probably has the same values as the Boy Scouts of America.
     I remember someone helping Burroughs out of his chair in Dallas.  The guy with the cast asked him if he had any children.  He replied, quietly, that he had a son.  Had.  His son had just passed away a few years before, during the making of the film.  There's a scene where he visits Burroughs in an apartment.  His son had his own appreciation of the streets of America, and collected his insights in manuscripts which were discovered after his death. The entire film, especially the scenes from NYC, feel like some kind of time capsule.  My memories of that goddamned decade still plays through my own head.  Had I in fact found William S. Burroughs?  In this film, he strikes me as moving though his life apart from the events depicted.  He is taken for photos with Laurie Anderson, shown the way to the stage, gently encouraged before he recounts stories from a party decades past.  Perhaps I reacted to this in my newspaper review.  When he does interact with life, it's through his work.  It's when he will walk onstage and sit at a desk with a light and a glass of water...  And when he spoke, he knew how to wail.