Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays

The Danger Zone

98 The Danger Zone eric ANDERSEN You can’t fake quality any more that you can fake a good meal. Naked Lunch—a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork. —William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands and Naked Lunch Come Right in Boys, Grab a Seat Y ou see him sitting there, the man in a narrow snap-brim hat and colorless suit, dunking a small cake into his coffee at a nameless lunch counter. You sit next to him and casually strike up a conversation. Something about his flat Midwestern drawl and incognito eyes draws you in. You talk about what ails. He speaks in steady, dry, matter-of-fact tones. You are impressed with his vast knowledge of pharmaceutical matters. It makes you wonder if he’s some kind of traveling psychopharmacologist . . . William Seward Burroughs, with his gaunt skeletal face, thin build, gray spectral eyes, and rumpled banker’s suit to match, may not be the first person you would bring home to meet mom and little sister. Residing within the conservative style, behind the dead, impassive eyes, and lurking just beneath the flat, hypnotic Missouri drawl is a man with a perilous history of darkest travels, menacing tales, criminal worlds, and years of drug addiction. A face that presented the world with a new version of pain. Burroughs almost always looked this way, the same at age thirty as age seventy-eight. He was born a young man in an old man’s body that never H_M Ch12.indd 98 3/30/09 12:36:49 PM The Danger Zone 99 seemed to age. His nickname was El hombre invisible (the invisible man) to the Tangier street regulars. His disguise was a nondescript suit. Dress codes aside, Burroughs never disguised his intentions nor pulled any punches about his meanings. Yet, there was a cool watchfulness without his seeming to look. And wasn’t William S. Burroughs always careful with words? Step Right Up, Welcome to the Funhouse With brutal honesty, cool surgical eye, and scalpel pen, William S. Burroughs instinctively peeled back the skin on issues American novelists rarely dared address. The stuff of his adventures, narcotic addictions, criminal experiences , exotic disease, and substance research (including opiates, sophisticated pharmaceuticals like scopolamine and LSD-25, and South American jungle poisons including curare), plus other myriad flora and fauna investigations, would quickly amass; then afterward, he would return with his discoveries to a room to assemble the material within the lab of his own skull. In Naked Lunch, he utilized much of the imagery he gleaned from his exotic wanderings and personal experiments to chilling effect. Fellow Tangier writer and friend Paul Bowles observed that Burroughs “was using his own life as an experiment.” In the preface to his short-story collection Trouble Is My Business, one of Burroughs’ mentors, Raymond Chandler, wrote, “Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning how to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power” (viii). By his hard-boiled lights, things were not looking good for mankind. Early on, young Burroughs, like Chandler before him, was innately skeptical of the planet’s future, predicting that Homo sapiens (his “homo saps” in Ghost of Chance) was a flawed, reckless species that would eventually self-destruct, “people of such great stupidity and such barbarous manners.” A few miles from his ranch school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb had been developed. Looking back, it wasn’t the majestic purple-blue mountain vistas that Burroughs would remember but the dust, Gila monsters, and malevolent centipedes creeping under the rocks. With exceptional powers of observation, a sharp ear for plainspoken American speech, keen sense of telepathy, and scathing wit, he assembled the shards of his multiprism world with awesome skill, elevating himself to the master of shock comedy and hilarious liberator of noir. Compared to all the early American pre-Beat writers, Burroughs’ prose still remains vibrant, unbridled,andremarkablyfresh.IfJack Kerouacwouldgoontomakespiritual maps of the road, Burroughs would soon provide blueprints for the future. H_M Ch12.indd 99 3/30/09 12:36:49 PM 100 eric ANDERSEN In his New York Times book review (25...