The World’s Most Literate Bugkiller
William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!, 1973
After his first few abortive real-life employment attempts in Chicago, William S. Burroughs got a job with A.J. Cohen, Exterminator, for $50 a week. The name is, unfortunately, impossible to verify, though he obviously did work as an exterminator. I looked through the microfiche from the 1942 phone books and searched online newspaper archives, but couldn’t turn up an exterminator company with this name. The only real clues I had were the supposed name of the company, and the bit at the start of the short story “Exterminator!” (from the 1973 collection of the same name) which reads: “During the war I worked for A.J. Cohen Exterminators ground floor office dead-end street by the river. An old Jew with cold grey fish eyes and a cigar was the oldest of four brothers. Marv was the youngest wore windbreakers had three kids.”
Was “A.J. Cohen” genuinely the name of the owner and business? Burroughs includes a Mrs. Murphy in the short story as a customer of the exterminator, so he did use real names upon occasion. “A.J./AJ” and “Marv” may have been stock names (they both turn up in Naked Lunch and other works, though “international playboy and harmless practical joker” AJ in NL agitates for the destruction of Israel, not an obvious thing a Jewish businessman is wont to do), or maybe they genuinely were names he got from the exterminators he worked for. A.J. may also have been named after A.J. Connell, the founder of the Los Alamos Ranch School that Burroughs attended from 1929-1932.
I tried contacting the Chicago Board of Health to see if they held any records. They said that they had nothing in their computer database and that they had lost a lot of records in a bad flood in the 1980s. I even tried sending out a spam email to a few Chicago exterminators asking if they could somehow offer shot-in-the-dark help, but received no replies except for one piece of spam email; hadn’t really expected to anyway.
What we do know is that Burroughs worked at the job for eight months, longer than any other employment he ever held, a cold middle-class vermin terminator prowling the potholed tarmac of his north Chicago beat in a black Ford V-8, a model which puts in a cameo appearance at the start of Naked Lunch as an “oil-burner.” The texterminator went round Chicago packing arsenic and fluoride and kerosene spray and pyrethrum powder and phosphorus paste, a narrow-eyed pest-death-drug-dealer. When he wasn’t wiping out rats and cockroaches and bedbugs and waterbugs, the literary wannabe-outlaw liked hanging around with the rodents in the hoodlum-slum-hood N. Kenmore, far under the frowning St. Louis radar of his disapproving headshaker parents.
In one hilarious scene from And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, Burroughs’ past as an exterminator comes to the fore unexpectedly and text-intrusively. At the rat-infested apartment of a woman named Betty-Lou, the Will Dennison / Burroughs character dismisses the woman’s attempts to kill a rat by putting down a graham cracker with phosphorous paste. “I knew this wouldn’t do any good because rats get wise to phosphorous paste. And besides, there were so many holes in her apartment that all the rats in New York could come in,” Dennison notes. On the next page he goes to relieve himself: “I excused myself and went to the toilet and leaned against the wall, keeping a sharp eye out for the rats.” Dennison has expressed no interest whatsoever in rodents until this point, and it’s clearly Burroughs’ Chicago pest control past presenting itself in an unexpected cameo. You wonder if he was even aware of writing these lines, or if they just came unconsciously.
“I think the exterminator is out in front,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan 26, 1943
And of course Burroughs’ old vermin-slaying vocation gets numerous mentions through Naked Lunch:
They call me the Exterminator. At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in yellow pyrethrum powder (”Hard to get now, lady…war on. Let you have a little…two dollars.”) Sluiced fat bedbugs from rose wall paper in shabby theatrical hotels on North Clark and poisoned the purposeful Rat, occasional eater of human babies. Wouldn’t you?
My present assignment: Find the live ones and exterminate. Not the bodies but the “molds,” you understand — but I forget that you cannot understand.
By 1959 the Chicago infiltration was complete. The bugdrug boogeyman image would become a central part of the Burroughs mythos, the narrow-eyed word-murderer killing old dead concepts and word meanings with his avant-garde literary exterminator examinations and experimentations.
(Text: Graham Rae)
