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 Parting Shot:
The Burroughs Routine,
My Simulated Episode
PART I of 5
By Nelson Gary
I love life, but not the one I have.
William S. Burroughs
I snacked on NAKED LUNCH for years, maybe, without knowing it, bulking up for this assignment: my first interview for Heroin Times, albeit with a dead person. The body of work left behind by William S. Burroughs-even the bits and pieces, the odds and ends-constitute the fullest account of what it means to be a heroin addict, but there is, of course, more to him and his writing than that. All of which this hyper-real quick fix cannot convey on a shoestring budget.
We, at Heroin Times, honor this with space, a major preoccupation in the work of William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs was as passionate about "the word" as he was obsessed with junk, which he used as a central metaphor in his work for more than just the act of getting high. In his perception of his own creative process, he performed an operation whereby which he inoculated the text, not unlike a shaman performing an exorcism of an evil spirit. An evil spirit possesses. Possession is the unmitigated and complete act of control: Burroughs, an anarchist.
What Burroughs sees as the central agent of control in the universe is ironically hair-splitting, as I found out when I interviewed him on May 5, Mexican Independence Day.
At his most lucid moments while injecting stream of consciousness routines into his texts, his writing is Mexican tar on china white sands: the voice of heroin itself, the strongest pain-killer on the planet, addressing the wounds of society and self that have afflicted the individual reader. The voice is slow, somehow soothing cackle of warm, black-humor punctuated by chuckles that glow like the embers of brimstone in the furnace of a charnel house.
His vision is ...
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