What was William Burroughs’s view of old age? For many years his primary, recurring literary protagonist—“Kim/Audrey”—was a version of himself in puberty and adolescence, but by the time he turned seventy his new work offered a series of middle-aged and elderly protagonists. Beginning in his late fifties with Ah Pook Is Here (1972) and continuing through the trilogy that began with Cities of the Red Night (1981), the idea of Death as a mythic antagonist had emerged as a central theme. In his later years Burroughs became preoccupied with the quasi-mystic Shootist gestalt of the Old West, and the elaborate “immortality blueprints” of the ancient Egyptians, with their mummies and their ontology of seven souls—a schema that Burroughs absorbed and adapted to his own literary purposes after reading Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings. In a passage from The Place of Dead Roads (1984)—a work-in-progress that was a staple of Burroughs’s many stage performances in the early 1980s—he makes an explicit statement of his ideas about immortality:
Kim has never doubted the possibility of an afterlife or the existence of gods. In fact he intends to become a god, to shoot his way to immortality, to invent his way, to write his way. […] Kim considers that immortality is the only goal worth striving for.
In Dead Roads, vacillating between his two personas—the persisting, unbearably radiant and amoral adolescent, Kim, and a new middle-aged figure, Joe the Dead, whose existence through many lifetimes has brought him to a desiccated, morbid condition—Burroughs clings to the viewpoint of Kim, despite the ever-widening gap between Kim’s age and his own:
Don Juan lists three obstacles or stages: Fear … Power … and Old Age.
Kim thought of old men with a shudder: drooling tobacco juice, spending furtive hours in the toilet crooning over their shit …. The only old men that were bearable were evil old men like the Old Man of the Mountain [Hassan i Sabbah] … […]
So Kim splits himself into many parts … He hopes to achieve a breakthrough before he has to face the terrible obstacle of old age …. […]
It is said that Waghdas [the city of enlightenment] is reached by many routes, all of them fraught with hideous perils. Worst of all, Kim thinks, is the risk of being trapped by old age in a soiled idiot body like Somerset Maugham’s. […]
Maugham would cower in a corner whimpering that he was a horrible and evil man.
He was, Kim reflected with the severity of youth, not evil enough to hold himself together …
Kim is killed in a shoot-out at the Boulder Cemetery on the last page of Dead Roads—but not by the other duelist, who is also shot dead, both slain by a mysterious sniper. Near the beginning of The Western Lands (1987), the last book of the Red Night trilogy, the author reveals who has shot them both: Joe the Dead, a shadowy character in Dead Roads whose life was saved by Kim, but only after he was horribly burned and maimed, and who worked for Kim and his gang. Here is Burroughs’s explanation of Joe’s motives and his existential condition:
Joe understood Kim so well that he could afford to dispense with him as a part of himself not useful or relevant at the present time. He understood Kim’s attempt to transcend his physical structure, to which he could never become reconciled, by an icy, inhuman perfection of attitude, painfully maintained and refined to an unbearable pitch. Joe turned to a negation of attitude, a purity of function that could be maintained only by the pressure of deadly purpose. […]
This continual pain is a sanction imposed by Nature, whose laws he flouts by remaining alive. Joe’s only lifeline is the love of certain animals. […]
Cats see him as a friend. They rub against him purring, and he can tame weasels, skunks and raccoons. He knows the lost art of turning an animal into a familiar. The touch must be very brave and very gentle.
In this passage we see an accurate snapshot of the elderly Burroughs himself, living alone with his cats and looking back on his life. The adolescent “Kim” has finally succumbed to the very personas into which he split himself, the representatives of the aging author.
Don Juan says that every man carries his own death with him at all times. The impeccable warrior contacts and confronts his death at all times, and is immortal. […]
As Joe moves about the house making tea, smoking cigarettes, reading trash, he finds that he is, from time to time, holding his breath. At such times a sound exhales from his lips, a sound of almost unbearable pain. […] What is wrong? To begin with, the lack of any position from which anything can be seen as right. He cannot conceive of a way out, since he has no place to leave from. His self is crumbling away to shreds and tatters, bits of old songs, stray quotations, fleeting spurts of purpose and direction sputtering out to nothing and nowhere, like the body at death deserted by one soul after the other.
On the first page of My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995), Burroughs recounts a dream remembered from thirty-five years before, shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch with the Olympia Press in Paris in 1959:
Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. “Flight sixty-nine has been—” Static … fades into the distance … “Flight …”
Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: “You haven’t had your education yet.”
The curriculum of this education was soon revealed: he would live on, long enough to see most of his closest human friends, and all but two of his beloved animal companions, cross over to the Land of the Dead.
The suicide of Michael Emerton at age twenty-six in November 1992 was the first devastating loss in these final years. Michael had been my partner for almost eight years; he and William had become very close. Just over a year later, as William and I were finally recovering from this shock, William’s first cat, the Russian Blue who had been the catalyst for the late-life opening of William’s tender emotions, died in early 1994. Ruski’s burial established the location of William’s “cat cemetery,” just south of a small pond that lies outside the window of his bedroom. Soon after Ruski’s death, a new stray appeared, and William named him Spooner. At the height of his menagerie in the mid-1990s, William had six cats: Ginger, Fletch, Calico, Mutie, Senshu, and Spooner. But inevitably his cats began to die: Spooner succumbed to feline leukemia in early 1995, and a year later Senshu was swept away by a flash flood in the little creek.
Calico Jane’s death in mid-November was just two weeks before the “Ports of Entry” show closed with The Nova Convention Revisited, a gala tribute to Burroughs at the University’s Lied Center for the Performing Arts. The performers were old friends of his, veterans of the Nova Convention of 1978 in New York; the house was packed, and William was touched by the community’s outpouring of affection and admiration. Two months later, in early February 1997, his eighty-third birthday was observed by a quiet gathering of friends in his home.
On a typical day in the last year of William Burroughs’s life he would awaken in the early morning and take his methadone (he became re-addicted to narcotics in New York in 1980, and was on a maintenance program the rest of his life) and then return to bed. If the day were Thursday, I would arrive at 8:00 A.M. to drive him to his clinic in Kansas City, or—after he had finally earned a biweekly pickup schedule—take him out to breakfast, so that his house could be cleaned. At about 9:30 A.M. on all other mornings William would arise and—in his slippers, pajamas, and dressing gown—make his breakfast, sometimes a salted soft-boiled egg with toast, or perhaps fresh-squeezed lemonade, and two cups of very sweet tea. Feeding his many cats at the beginning of each day took up considerable time, only after which would he shave and dress himself, by about noon.
William