I remember once watching a late-night cop show that warned viewers not to put up pictures of our family members in our places of work. Someone who gets pathologically obsessed with us may exact revenge by stalking, kidnapping, or killing those near and dear to us. The rationale: If they know your vulnerability, they can get to you. My semi-paranoid parents themselves would say something like that to me after having watched the show.
Never mind that mom had pictures of my brother and me everywhere in her office back in the 70s and 80s – despite mom’s impeccable taste, my brother had on his ugly pastel bell bottoms and glasses with five-inch thick, black frames, and me in full buffoon regalia that the parents invariably insisted I wear to picture day – and she worked with some ill-tempered and dicey people, let me tell you. I am sure mom had a large share of terribly disgruntled employees wander through her office threatening her with all sorts of bodily harm because she told them to stop eating and to get back to work. (The untold joys of being a government health administrator with underlings!) But, they wouldn’t have dreamed of kidnapping me or my brother to get back at my mother. Especially not when we looked like what I described above, and would have severely clashed with everyone’s decor. Child models we were not.
I can imagine a former student calling my office and whispering hoarsely into the mouthpiece, “You’d better retract that D you gave me or the old man is going to get it.”
“What old man?”
“The old bastard in the picture by your desk.”
“Oh, him,” I say. “He’s William S. Burroughs. Yeah, sure. You can have him after you dig his cold, dead bones out of a cemetery plot in Lawrence, Kansas. Let me know when you do, I would like to come take a looksee.”
*Click* The line goes dead.
Oh, my imagination and how it abuses its free time!
The adventurous few often wander by my desk, and some even venture to ask me who the grandfather in the picture is. I explain that he is Bill Burroughs, one of my favorite thinkers, writers, and freaks of the 20th century and that I like the black-and-white for its stark Richard Avedonesque simplicity. And it’s like having a strange metabeing watch over me as I work. I especially like the slow, wide-eyed nods I get for saying that. That is alright.
My fascination with Burroughs started with his book, The Naked Lunch and the subsequent movie. Something terribly unsettling and ironically humorous about a typewriter that turns into a talking sphincter. Helps keep writing in perspective upon imagining my pen and keyboard morphing into … well, let’s just let that analogy go into the annals of scatology.
No, such self-deprecating ideas are not shows of diffidence. It’s laughing at yourself. Knowing that you do not know and are trying to work through it, whatever it is. Maybe all is in finding out what it is.
Speaking of keeping myself in line, I should probably try studying for the final final exam of my life, instead of waxing sporadic about photographs and the impact of Burroughs on my life.
It’s full of holes … it’s full of holes …
