Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays

William S. Burroughs as “Good Ol’ Boy”: Naked Lunch in East Texas

43 William S. Burroughs as “Good Ol’ Boy”: Naked Lunch in East Texas rob JOHNSON I ’m on the Naked Lunch inter-American highway, just outside of Houston , Texas, driving North on I-45 towards the New Waverly exit, the same exit Billy Burroughs would take to his “ranch” in Pine Valley, ten miles from Coldspring, Texas, the seat of San Jacinto County and home of Naked Lunch’s “County Clerk.” This is just one stop on the Naked Lunch highway, which begins in Mexico City, crosses Texas into Louisiana, and terminates in New Orleans. Burroughs describes the entire trip in a spectacular three-page passage in Naked Lunch (abbreviated below): And the junk was running low. So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup. And vomited up the syrup and drove on and on, cold spring wind whistling through that old heap around our shivering, sick sweating bodies [ . . . ] On through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and vultures over the swamp and cypress stumps. Motels with beaverboard walls, gas heater, thin pink blankets. Itinerant short con and carny hype men have burned down the croakers of Texas. [ . . . ] Came at last to Houston where I know a druggist. I haven’t been there in five years but he looks up and makes me with one quick look and just nods [ . . . ] “A quart of PG and a hundred nembies.” [ . . . ] Shooting PG is a terrible hassle [ . . . ] So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas H_M Ch6.indd 43 3/25/09 7:32:17 AM 44 rob JOHNSON flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish . . . New Orleans is a dead museum. [ . . . ] We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico. Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures [ . . . ] Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water. “Thomas and Charlie,” I said. “What?” “That’s the name of this town. Sea level. We climb straight up from here ten thousand feet.” [ . . . ] Mexico City where Lupita sits like an Aztec Earth Goddess doling out her little papers of lousy shit. (12–14) Burroughs was making this drive in the mid- to late 1940s, long before the completion of the interstate-highway system. En route to his east Texas “ranch” from his farmland in Pharr, located in deep south Texas near the Mexican border, Burroughs drove (using the old highway numbers) Highway 281 North to Alice, Texas, then took Highway 59 North over to Beeville (where he was arrested in 1948 by the notoriously racist south Texas Sheriff Robert “Vail” Ennis) and on up through Victoria, Texas, into Houston. There, he headed his Jeep north on Highway 75 (now Interstate 45) and just past Conroe exited onto a county road connecting New Waverly and Coldspring (now Highway 150). If he was bound for New Orleans, he drove Highway 90 east through Beaumont and Vidor (where, as recently as 1993, the Ku Klux Klan marched against the integration of public housing), crossing the Sabine River on a swing bridge at Orange, Texas, and entering Louisiana on a two-lane road lined with nightclubs, casinos, and whorehouses (“marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars”). Past Lake Charles (“dead slotmachine country”), he drove at sea level through the swamps south of Grand Lake via Highway 90, which took him by a southerly route into New Orleans. Returning to Mexico City, back through Houston, Burroughs headed the Jeep south on Highway 59 to Laredo, described by Jack Kerouac in On the Road as “the bottom and dregs of America” (249). South of the border, from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City, he toured the recently completed (in 1937) 770-mile leg of the Pan American Highway. The last major stop on the old highway before Mexico City was Tamazunchale (“‘Thomas and Charlie,’ he said”), site of an old Aztec town. Driving the far-northern outskirts of Houston’s famously unzoned sprawl (where churches sit next to topless bars), I already feel my...