Like a drug-addicted Holden Caulfield

After William Burroughs Sr. shot his wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs, in a drunken game of William Tell, his son, William Jr., or Billy, was sent to live with his grandparents in Florida and separated from his father for most of his formative years. After becoming addicted to speed as a teen in the late 1960s, he went to Lexington, KY for rehab, then to Alaska as part of an experimental school’s therapeutic expedition.

Billy Burroughs' reputation as a writer is unfortunately eclipsed by the extent of his father's fame as proto-Beat. I'll admit Burroughs Sr. is an excellent essayist, but I never really dug the cut-up method, speaking as a reader.

Burroughs, Jr.’s Speed is a smartly-worded, extremely readable novel about psychic frontiers from the horse’s mouth. Billy embarks on a hallucinatory voyage from his grandparents’ mansion in Florida to bomb around New York City like a drug-addicted Holden Caulfield in search of some ultimate reality in which to play goalie. Kentucky Ham is great in places too, picking up from Billy’s return to Florida and covering his time in rehab and his trip to Alaska. It begins really well but suffers slightly from the imposition of a diary-entries style toward the end.

Cursed from Birth, The short Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr. is more of a compilation of after-effects than a literary production. Billy Burroughs had contracted to write a third novel after Speed and Kentucky Ham called Prakriti Junction (meaning of title unknown to me), but his death from liver transplant failure due to heavy drinking came too suddenly for him to fulfill it. Cursed From Birth is his notes on that unfinished project spliced together with his post-mortem after-effects like disjointed correspondence with his father, by turns enraged and respectful, plus commentary from witnesses of his tragic decline and demise at 34. Near the end of his life, Billy spent a lot of time in Boulder and Denver, drinking heavily despite the transplanted liver, which he’d begun referring to as “my new wife,” having learned its donor was female. Later passages are starkly reflective of his mental deterioration towards the en of his life. He is buried at Marpa Point outside Boulder.