William Burroughs & the Zen of Stalk Shooting

Propst knew of an acreage for sale, and Burroughs came out to walk the property. As always, Bill has a pistol in the pocket of his suit coat, today the short-barreled .38 he calls Stubby.

"I bet you five bucks I can hit that weed over there," Bill says, pointing to a dried ragweed stalk poking up 20 feet away.

"I'm in," says Propst.

Bill pulls the pistol, sights slowly, fires one time. Clipped in two, the stalk gives up the ghost. He turns to Propst and waggles his fingers-- "pay up." Propst, taken aback at this icon of cult lit holding him to a bet, hands over the five bucks.

Now, hitting anything smaller than a barn with a snub-nosed pistol at twenty feet is impossible or just shit-house luck. But consider the magic bullet. Some bullets are made for a single target, and wherever you point, it goes where it was born to go.

In the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser's wand and points where the bullet wants to go. This is what the Master does. He shoots the stalk in two to show the student that it's not about him or how he thinks. It's about how the world is.

"Now, if he'd have missed it,” says Propst, “that doesn't mean that we wouldn't have been friends, that I would have said, 'You stupid old man, you can't even shoot a gun! Fuck you! Get out of here!' 

There’s also the aesthetic dimension.

Another day, Propst’s constructed a bowling-ball cannon. He comes out of the barn with a larger-than-life plywood cutout of a man wearing a fedora, splattered with shotgun paint and bullet holes from handguns. Before, the plywood man had only holes made by pellets and bullets. Now it has one the size of a bowling ball.

Burroughs takes a moment to size up the piece, then says: "That last hole, I think, has made it into something. It’s the difference between art and failed art.”

[P.S. from Wayne Pounds: Adapted from an interview with Wayne Propst: http://www.lawrence.com/news/2007/jul/30/burroughs_student/. The pic, like a lot of Burroughs stuff in my files, has been in my possession so long that I no longer remember its provenance.]