DRIVE-IN SATURDAY

LONESOME COWBOY BILL

DRIVE-IN SATURDAY

by

Edouard Dauphin

“He’s a hard guy to get into bed— that’s why I like him.”

—Patti Smith

So to whom was the Thin White Duchess referring, you might well ask, as you peruse this column, Boy Howdy flagon clutched in one paw, a slice of Weenie Pizza with extra cheese gripped in the other. Was Detroit’s favorite housewife jawing about Keef or Iggy or even her own spouse? Nah, just paying one more tribute to an old junky beatnik priest.

The Dauphin ain’t much for heroes (with the possible exception of Rasputin) but one could do a whole lot worse than to admire the style and achievements of William S. Burroughs, friend to Patti and the likes of Laurie Anderson (and their cohort in Dial-A-Poem) and subject of Burroughs, a new film by someone called Howard Brookner and the first documentary this jaded scribbler has even seen since Debbie Does Duluth.

The movie opens gratuitously with a segment from a Saturday Night Live show of a few seasons back wherein Lauren Hutton—she of the David Letterman smile—introduces Burroughs to a national TV audience as “the greatest living American writer.” Guess in between all those top bucks modeling assignments and starring roles in classics like Lassiter, the gap-toothed beauty has really been boning up on Modern Lit.

In the fuzzy TV footage, Burroughs proceeds to read passages from early works, banned or rejected by publishers years ago, hunched over a desk, resembling a waspish high school English teacher, while the zombies who stand in line for a live TV show chortle knowingly, though each of them would probably have preferred that the special guest had been Victoria Principal. But before one can possibly get the impression Burroughs is little more than a prissy opportunist, the film begins in earnest and a portrait emerges fraught with drunkenness, violence, hysteria, manslaughter—all the elements so dear to The Dauphin’s twisted heart.

As the film unwinds, it becomes clear that the writer has been a bit odd since childhood. Grandson of the man who invented the Burroughs adding machine, he grew up in St. Louis, where he was soon spotted as a threat to his elders, with one of them commenting that he “looked like a sheep-killing dog.” A fellow student of Burroughs at Harvard tells the film makers with some bemusement that he kept ferrets as pets in the dorm. But that was quirky compared to what would follow.

Burroughs’s bisexuality—while at Columbia University, he had a fling with Allen Ginsberg which is lovingly recalled by the OM-inous one— and his addiction to heroin and morphine have long been documented, mostly in the writer’s own books and they are touched on in the film. But far more footage is devoted to a bit of trouble Burroughs had in Mexico in 1951 when, in imitation of William Tell, he tried to shoot a champagne glass off his wife’s head. Burroughs blew her brains out instead, yet recalls her fondly as once telling him: “You’re supposed to be a faggot, but you’re just like a pimp in bed.”

The old bastard lives in Lawrence, Kansas now—yep, the same burg they nuked in The Day After. He continues to write and performs occasionally with new wave-ish bands. Still he is philosophical about a career that might have been in espionage. “I was almost accepted by Col. Bill Donovan,” he remarks. “I might have been head of the CIA.” Perhaps the best moment in the film is when he warns that if you’re walking down the street and, for no apparent reason, tears begin streaming down your face, it’s time to “watch out, baby.” Dauph has been telling that to the publishers at CREEM for years—but it still hasn’t gotten me a raise.

See Burroughs and go out and buy one of his books, too. Don’t you want to be as well read as Lauren Hutton?

Beware of films that are cute. Beware of films that are precious. Beware of films that promise to “put a smile on your face.” Beware of films with robots that watch Frank Capra films. Beware of films that star Klaus Kinski. Beware of Android.