with an entourage of cats,
an arsenal of guns,
a carousel of celebrity guests.
Word circulated through the English Department
that he frequented The Bottleneck bar.
One November afternoon, I spotted him there,
crouched alone in a corner,
pressed herringbone suit,
hickory sword cane tap-tap-tapping to the music.
Our bartender whispered that he drank tequila,
so I purchased two shots and approached.
"Pardon me, Mr. Burroughs.
I am just a B-I-G admirer of your writing.
May I offer you a tequila?"
"Why, certainly, young man."
We tossed back our shots.
I retrieved the glasses.
He eyeballed me with his steely cobalt eyes.
I fell into a trance waiting for him to blink:
These are eyes that starred down
the barrel of a pistol
pointed at his wife's cranium (pow!),
eyes that peered unflinchingly
into a junk-sick abyss,
eyes that crawled like insects
over countless young male bodies.
The band lurched into a new song
as a curiosity stirred in my groin,
then crept up my spine:
Is this old queen expecting a come-on?!
I hoped to impress the Godfather of the Beats
with tales of imagined literary exploits,
regale him with an irreverent anecdote.
Instead, I stood there, an imbecile,
barely mustering an oafish smile,
which he met, bless him, with a kindly grin
that pierced my anxious fever.
I retreated to the bar.
"How did it go?" the bartender asked.
"Oh, brilliant ... Yeah ...
One for the memoirs."
And some say it was William Burroughs,
not Thomas Lambert,
who brought the literary bona fides
to Lawrence, Kansas.
**First published in Fjords Review
