Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,54

That spring Luc Sante’s scathing essay on Burroughs in the New York Review of Books made a deep impression on me. He quoted Burroughs as saying to an interviewer, “In the words of one of a great misogynist’s plain Mr. Jones, in Conrad’s Victory: ‘Women are a perfect curse.’ I think they were a basic mistake, and the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error.” Sante wrote, “He associates women with the most repressive aspects of Western culture, and he has no sexual need for them; q.e.d., they are superfluous and impedimental. When the tricky problem of reproduction is eventually solved, women will simply be wished away.” Burroughs had also shot dead Joan Vollmer, his wife, on September 6, 1951, and though there are conflicting versions of how and why he asked her to put a glass on her head for him so he could “play William Tell,” what’s clear is that he pointed a gun at her and shot her through the forehead and she died.

A young man I spent time with in my twenties, my boyfriend’s younger brother’s best friend, was more enamored of Burroughs than anyone else I knew, though a lot of people I knew revered the old writer back in the day when he was seen as one of the godfathers of punk culture. The young man was gay, cut off from his Texas family, trying to find his way, a talented musician, but a devotee of the idea of the derangement of the senses through drugs as the royal road to artistic genius. That derangement came up from Arthur Rimbaud a century before and evolved into another fixture of counterculture, the idea that you got to your creative self by getting fucked up, that some genius is lurking behind the inhibitions and you just have to let the genius out to do its thing without plan or discipline or structure.

Burroughs was seen by some of the young people around me as exemplary of all this, and he had spent a lot of time taking a lot of drugs, buffered by a family allowance and an apparently iron constitution. The young man I knew had neither. I remember with affection one evening with him when he was hallucinating and wielding colored markers, trying to draw on paper (and album covers) and scrawling directly on the floor of my apartment. Then it’s with sadness that I remember him becoming more and more of a meth addict, and then a homeless person walking barefoot in dirty jeans on Market Street unable to recognize me. He was cared for by a kind older man for a while, and then I heard he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, a sweet and talented young soul, dead of many things, including the prevailing mythology.

My editor and I went to the party at the Survival Research Labs industrial space under a freeway overpass in chiffon dresses. She was full figured, with long blond hair, and wore something beautiful and flowing with lots of cleavage; I wore what I thought of as my dead ballerina outfit. It had probably been a child’s dress and then moldered for years in some basement before I found it in a thrift store. It had a tiny bodice with rows of yellowed lace, strapless, though I’d improvised a strap out of one of the half-torn-off rows of lace, and a full, calf-length skirt made of shredding petals of gauzy fabric that hung down in points.

I’ve often found that I want to live up to my outfit, and a festive outfit produces a festive spirit, and so she and I went shouting with laughter, flirting and weaving and waving our arms and wafting perfume and smiling lipstick smiles and looking around freely with our painted eyes among the people who were standing about being so deadpan they seemed to have turned to stone. The man accompanying Burroughs was taking photographs and he wanted to photograph us with the guest of honor and there was a moment when at his urging she and I came at Burroughs from either side and he shrank into his already withered self in what appeared to be horror. I’ve always described him as looking like a slug between two saltshakers in that moment. It was very satisfying, and then we moved on.

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Writing is an art; publishing is a business, and in starting my first book I