That William Burroughs lived to such an immense age is a tribute to the
rejuvinating powers of a mis-spent life. More than half a century of heavy
drug use failed to dim either his remarkably sharp mind or his dryly
crackling humour. When I last saw him in London a few years ago he was
stooped and easily tired, but little different from the already legendary
figure I first met in the early 1960s at his service flat in Duke Street,
St James.
Esquire had asked me to write a profile of him, but Burroughs, though
courteous, was very suspicious. The baleful power of media empires already
obsessed him. While his young boyfriend, "love" and "hate" tattooed on his
knuckles, carved a roast chicken, Burroughs described the most effectively
way to stab a man to death. All the while he kept an eye on the doors and
windows. "The CIA are watching me," he confided. "They park their laundry
vans in the street outside."
I don't think he was having me on. His imagination was filled with bizarre
lore culled from Believe It Or Not features, police pulps and - in the
case, I assume, of the laundry vans - Hollywood spy movies of the cold war
years. When Burroughs talked about Time magazine's conspiracy to take over
the world he meant it literally.
I turned down the Esquire assignment, realising that nothing I wrote could
remotely do justice to Burroughs's magnificently paranoid imagination. He
changed little over the decades, and hardly needed to - his weird genius
was the perfect mirror of his times, and made him the most important and
original writer since the second world war. Now we are left with the career
novelists.
http://www.pugzine.com/pug3/ballardobit.html
