WILLIAM BURROUGHS AND I were friends for nearly a decade before I flew out to visit him at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, from April 3–6, 1987. We had gotten to know each other when, in my twenties, I published a variant passage from The Naked Lunch as a small press book, Doctor Benway, with an introduction he wrote for the occasion. In the years following, we mostly met for long afternoons into the night with James Grauerholz and others at my old apartment on West Ninth Street, conversing about everything imaginable. And in Conjunctions:9, I was honored to run an excerpt from William’s amazing tribute to felines, “The Cat Inside,” which includes one of my favorite—of many—Burroughs lines: “Workers are paid in cats and cat food.”
Anyone I have ever known who met William unvaryingly found him to be a true gentleman, gracious and sharp-witted, an irrepressible, knowledgeable raconteur of the first order. During my stay with him in Lawrence he was in fine form, introducing me to a man who made walking sticks from bull pizzles and teaching me how to throw knives into the wooden siding of his backyard garage. I hadn’t intended to interview him or made any preparations to do so, but as a person who has always loved animals, I noticed over the course of the first couple of days out there that our conversation kept returning to lemurs and a host of other beasts.
Not unexpectedly, William had a large posse of cats. One basement window of his house was left open so that this tribe of neighborhood kitties could come and go as they pleased, eat the food and drink the water William left downstairs for them. Some were feral, others were moochers from down the block, yet others were official residents with names, but all were in one way or another as devoted to William as he was to them. He was a born animal behaviorist. Cat Fancy magazines were stacked on the coffee table in the living room and the only television shows I saw William watch (with the sound off, as I recall) were nature programs. In short, the man was as devoted to animals as I was. Without giving it much thought, I asked if we could do an impromptu talk about the subject.
Why was our dialogue never published before now? Quick answer is, when I got back home to New York, I listened to the tape in horror. The audio quality was so poor that transcription seemed impossible. The project, if one could call it a project, was set aside and the tape itself went missing for a number of years. It wasn’t until we decided to do an issue of Conjunctions devoted to animals that I set about searching around in earnest for the cassette and found it. I asked my friend Dan Grigsby, a sound engineer and expert at audio restoration, if he would try to improve the sound quality enough that we could transcribe it. To say we are deeply grateful for Dan’s painstaking work would be a serious understatement. I want also to thank Micaela Morrissette, Nicole Nyhan, Joss Lake, Zappa Graham, Emma Horwitz, and Pat Sims for their combined efforts with me to transcribe this talk. Alas, even with all these attentive ears at work, a few words remain too elusive to include with confidence, so pardon us a couple of lacunae.
I must express great gratitude to my dear friend of so many years, James Grauerholz, Burroughs’s secretary and now literary executor, for taking the time to read the transcript for accuracy and generously granting permission for its publication here. As the reader will see, the conversation is freewheeling and extemporaneous, but William’s elemental genius, the distinctive way he viewed the world around him and all the beasts in it, humans included, shines through.
BRADFORD MORROW: Let’s talk about animals. When did you first fall in love with lemurs?
WILLIAM BURROUGHS: Oh, well, I’d heard about them, I didn’t know much about them. I had a very good impression of them, marvelous creatures. It was stirred since I got into cats. I see lemurs as marvelous animals. See, they were at one time widely distributed all across the world. And now they’ve shrunk back so that they’re only now found in Madagascar, true lemurs. I know there are creatures similar to lemurs found in Borneo. Gliding lemurs, flying lemurs, found in Borneo.
MORROW: So, the lemurs came out of your interest in cats.
BURROUGHS: Yes. They’re kind of a combination of monkey and cat and they’re humans.
MORROW: But lemurs, they’re not in the cat family.
BURROUGHS: They’re not in the cat family nor are they in the monkey family. They call them prosimians. They’re not monkeys. There are no monkeys in Madagascar. And also there are no predators.
MORROW: You mentioned you can see lemurs somewhere in the United States.
BURROUGHS: Oh, yes. There’s the prosimian center at Duke University. I’ve corresponded with them. They’ve got three hundred lemurs in a natural habitat. I showed you the pictures. Yes, and I’m going down there to talk to them and see their lemurs. Apparently lemurs tame very readily. The pictures show the lemurs climbing all over people. Beautiful creatures. They’ll just jump up on their shoulders.
MORROW: Those are ring-tailed?
BURROUGHS: Ring-tailed, yes. Those are also known as cat lemurs …
MORROW: Cat lemurs.
BURROUGHS: Because they purr, like a cat. They are the easiest to tame. Some of the larger lemurs like the spotted and the black lemurs are not so easy to tame. It takes time.
MORROW: Cats, you’ve always loved cats?
BURROUGHS: My whole life, oh yes. When I moved here, I was out in the country and that’s when I think a mess of cats came around and I formed an attachment to this one who would keep coming over. We had a stone house at the top of the hill where we had all these cats.
MORROW: And you told me about a snake, when we were together last in New York, that you liked too.
BURROUGHS: Oh, I don’t judge the snakes.
MORROW: What are your favorite animals?
BURROUGHS: Lemurs.
MORROW: Lemurs are your favorite—you like them even better than cats?
BURROUGHS: Well, we don’t have to draw a line. I like cats, I like lemurs, I like raccoons, I like—skunks are marvelous animals. When I was a kid, we used to have descented skunks as pets. They make great pets. But now the vet says it’s practically illegal for him to treat a skunk or a raccoon because of rabies. The ordinary vaccination doesn’t always take with lemurs, with humans, with skunks, or raccoons. People are discouraged from making pets out of them—they make very gentle pets. But skunks are great. Skunks are like ferrets, weasels, raccoons. Some of them are called ringtail cats, but it isn’t a cat. It’s essentially a raccoon but it’s much smaller than a raccoon. It’s like a miniature raccoon; they only weigh about four or five pounds. But in the wild, the wild cats, there’s lots of cats, wild cats, that are much smaller than house cats. There’s one, the rusty spotted cat that only weighs four pounds at maturity. A miniature cat …
MORROW: You were telling me yesterday about this project for an animal center in Lawrence of some sort.
BURROUGHS: Well, a no-kill animal shelter.
MORROW: I think that would be a great idea.
BURROUGHS: Well, yes, they have two in New York, outside of New York City. Also there’s one in Chicago called Tree House. There’s one outside of New York, in Bronxville or somewhere, called the Elmsford Shelter. I got a list of them somewhere in my Cat Fancy, and there are about ten of them scattered around.
MORROW: If you had your way, how would you run a shelter, how would somebody do that?
BURROUGHS: Well, I’d write to Tree House to find out how they do it. But what you do is, well you have to enclose animals and monitor them, photo them, get them spayed and neutered. Some get stopped from breeding, get put up for adoption and all that. It’s no big trick nor is it necessarily very expensive. They have these food dispensers. These need to be filled, every day and week.
MORROW: There are stray dogs in Lawrence.
BURROUGHS: Well, naturally, yes, there are. I’m not interested in dogs.
MORROW: (Laughs.) I won’t ask. Birds, you have a bird feeder.
BURROUGHS: I have a feeder. Well, I just don’t care for them all that very much, about birds. I like crows. I had a pet crow for a while. Crows are more intelligent than birds. It was a long time ago, about sixteen years, I had a pet crow. I had its wings fixed. But whenever it heard one of the other crows, it would just go nuts, go flapping out there.
MORROW: Where was that?
BURROUGHS: Outside of St. Louis. This crow would eat bananas out of my hand very eagerly and then it pecked viciously at my fingers.
MORROW: When the banana was there?
BURROUGHS: No, no, anytime. He wanted to eat but didn’t like me, so I let the wings grow back.
MORROW: Was he a lame crow? Well, you don’t go to a pet shop and buy one.
BURROUGHS: No, you don’t. Someone brought him when he was very young. But he just wanted to be with the other crows, so I let his wings grow out.
MORROW: And that’s how that story ended?
BURROUGHS: He flew away with the other crows.
MORROW: Be hard to keep a crow and cats at the same time.
BURROUGHS: Well, I didn’t have cats then.
MORROW: What other animals have you kept?
BURROUGHS: Oh, I’ve had a ferret. And I had an angora goat. It was a little goat. Little goats are the cutest things. Put out your fist and they don’t budge. Cute little thing.
MORROW: Long-legged. Kind of wobbly.
BURROUGHS: Well, I guess.
MORROW: You seem to be an expert on snakes too, and spiders.
BURROUGHS: Well, snakes I don’t care about—well, not always. The relative potency of the venoms—the most, I suppose, drop to drop, is between a krait and a sea snake, a yellow-bellied sea snake. All sea snakes are poisonous. And some of them are deadly poisonous. The fatal dose of a sea snake or a krait is about one or two milligrams, it’s a thirty-second of a grain, a tiny amount. But a krait, it’s about—you can almost never pick them up; sea snakes, it just doesn’t happen. People are bitten by the kraits. And even with immediate antivenom, your chances are only fifty-fifty. Without antivenom, they’re nil. Get the table lamp, I’ve got a snake book here somewhere, it shows the number of people bitten and their deaths … (Looking at book.) You’ve got, like, people bitten by a cobra, 150 deaths … ten or twelve, this was with antivenom, of course. Now we get to the krait. Number of people bitten, nine; deaths, eight.
MORROW: This is where?
BURROUGHS: India. It shows the relative potency of the venom. Now, the bushmaster, which is a huge snake, it’s got to be twelve, fifteen feet long and as big around as that. (Gesturing.) But they have a very weak venom. It’s two hundred milligrams is the fatal dose—imagine, two hundred milligrams as opposed to one milligram. But they’ve got a hell of a lot of it. That’s their … They can shoot in a jigger full of their venom. The shock of that, without a doubt, leaves you dead in a few minutes. If they had a potent venom like the krait they’d really be a terror. Probably the most dangerous of all the snakes, well, the most dangerous snake, is probably the black mamba.
MORROW: Where is that?
BURROUGHS: In Africa. They’re very potent. I think fifteen milligrams is the fatal dose. They’ve got a lot of it. They get to be eleven feet long.
MORROW: How did you gather up all this information?
BURROUGHS: Various places, like in books.
MORROW: Any idea why you would be interested in snakes? It’s not like you keep snakes.
BURROUGHS: No, I don’t keep snakes.
MORROW: Any idea why?
BURROUGHS: Never ask anyone “why.” (Laughter.) Never ask anyone “why.” They’ve got a little bladder of poisonous venoms. Of course, the black widow has a very potent venom, you can [inaudible] a tiny amount, it’ll make people deathly sick. It’s not fatal for a healthy adult but it makes you very, very sick indeed. Gives you terrible stomach cramps.
MORROW: What kind of snakes do you have around here?
BURROUGHS: We have a team this year, they’ve caught about fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of snakes. We’ve caught copperheads. They have quite a weak venom. These snake handlers get their reputation handling copperheads. It’s about the same potency as the bushmaster. That is, two hundred milligrams is the fatal dose. But no copperhead would have anywhere near that much. They probably have fifty milligrams at the most so people very rarely die from a copperhead bite. So they got copperheads, and they got a [inaudible]. Small, about that big (Gesturing.), but Dean milked it for me just to show me how it’s done. He’s not into the venom business. He got a fatal dose: Sixty milligrams is the fatal dose for that kind of snake.
MORROW: What is the venom used for?
BURROUGHS: To make antivenom. That’s a large-scale operation.
MORROW: You have to have the exact same snake venom to get the antivenom?
BURROUGHS: Sure, well, there are classes of venom. The two main classes are neuro- and hemotoxic venom. Neurotoxin is a nerve venom. That’s the cobras. Cobras, kraits, sea snakes, mambas. This is quite painless. People may not even know they’ve been bitten right away with a mamba until they start to slur their words, their speech gets slurred like they’re drunk, and then they’re—boom—dead. Dean brought in a black mamba and a green mamba. When he was here he had a green mamba and he wouldn’t let it out, they’re too quick. Another thing about the mambas is they’re very quick, they’re very hysterical, and they will attack without provocation.
MORROW: They’re arboreal?
BURROUGHS: They’re arboreal, so they come slipping down out of the tree and they’ll whack you. They can make ten miles on the level. That’s fast.
MORROW: That’s quick.
BURROUGHS: One of the quickest snakes. Quick and very aggressive and very dangerous. If I let it out, it would get up on something and I’d have a hell of a time getting it down. We let a cobra out in this room once—Dean had a cobra, thirteen feet long.
MORROW: In this room?
BURROUGHS: Yeah. It went all around the room. He had a special trick to control it with, though. He came out with a hook.
MORROW: Who is this?
BURROUGHS: Dean Ripa. He’s a real professional snake catcher, he’s been bitten three or four times.
MORROW: You don’t go in for the big zoo-type animals then, you’re not crazy about them, elephants or …?
BURROUGHS: Oh, well, no, I don’t have the facilities. (Laughter.) He had the Gaboon viper, he had one of those and laid it down on the couch here. Now this thing is about that big around and that long, weighed thirty pounds. Had a head like a small shovel. That’s a hell of a thing to be bitten by. They have both neuro- and hemotoxic venom and a lot of it. Fangs about an inch long. It just lay there and growled. They growl, like a dog.
MORROW: On your couch here?
BURROUGHS: Yes. He growled, like a dog. Another thing about them, see, most snakes do this. (Makes a slithering gesture.) The viper walks on its ribs like a caterpillar. It looks very sluggish, but they can move very, very rapidly, they can catch a rat in the air. Very dangerous …
MORROW: How did this Gaboon move?
BURROUGHS: Crawls on its ribs, eyes straight ahead.
MORROW: Ripa was just showing off his snakes?
BURROUGHS: He had eight of them that he had to offer. I said I couldn’t have them in the house because of the cats … There’s very little money in this. I said, How much do you get for this Gaboon viper that you brought back from Ghana? Well, six hundred dollars. I said, That’s ridiculous. I thought five thousand.
MORROW: What’s the life expectancy of a Gaboon?
BURROUGHS: Oh, like most snakes they live quite a long while. I don’t know just how long, but years. Ten, twenty, thirty years. They live a long time.
MORROW: You were talking about going to Madagascar, right?
BURROUGHS: Yes. Well, I don’t know, I’m going to go down and talk to these people at Duke and find out all the details, you know, the visas and all that.
MORROW: That would be a great trip.
BURROUGHS: Yeah, very expensive to get there and back because it’s so far. It’s about five thousand dollars round-trip.
MORROW: That would be to go to see the lemurs?
BURROUGHS: Well, I’m going to see the lemurs here. Well, listen: that, and I want to see the whole of Madagascar, you know, the different plants, everything they got there. They’ve got all kinds of quite unique plants and animals.
MORROW: Have you been to the Galápagos?
BURROUGHS: No, I haven’t, but I’m not so interested in that as I am in Madagascar. I’d also like to go to Easter Island, to see the giant heads.
(Morrow turns off the tape recorder for a break. When he turns it back on, the dialogue recommences with discussion about Central and South American environmental issues, particularly the denuding of rain forests in the Amazon, the Iran-Contra affair, American education, and political apathy among youth.)
MORROW: I can imagine an argument, though, where it’s not any worse now than it’s ever been. It’s just, it’s the same kind of shit you must have complained about thirty years ago.
BURROUGHS: I wonder. I wonder. No, I think—
MORROW: You think it’s gotten worse?
BURROUGHS: Oh, yes, I think the young people now are politically more ignorant than they were in my day. Jesus Christ, we at least looked at maps of the world, and I don’t think there was anyone in the high school that I went to—of course, this was way before the war—but certainly they would all have been able to place France and England and Germany on a map of Europe.
MORROW: They would have been able to tell you who fought in World War I.
BURROUGHS: Yes, they probably would, and they would also know when the Civil War was fought.
MORROW: How do you turn something like this around?
BURROUGHS: I don’t think you can, and I don’t know the point in bothering with it.
MORROW: Why do you say that?
BURROUGHS: I’m not concerned about these stupid people. I’m more concerned with animals than with people now. There are too many people! They’re not endangered enough.