Jonathan “Yony” Leyser’s brief career has been all about celebrating outsiders, in sordid but sympathetic portraits of transgender and anarchist communes, addicts and migrant workers. Now the 24-year-old filmmaker and photographer, who’s been kicked out of two art schools, is nearly finished with an ambitious assessment of perhaps the greatest literary outlaw of the 20th century.
The son of Israeli immigrants who’d come to Chicago in the 70s, Leyser was just 12 when Burroughs died in 1997, at age 83. Leyser’s mother, Ayala, was a criminal psychiatrist at Elgin Mental Health Center, and his father, Yona, taught special education at Northern Illinois University. He started writing and performing early, in elementary school and Park District theater programs. In high school at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, he got turned on to documentaries through the works of Errol Morris and the Maysles brothers and became taken with the Beats.
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Burroughs also spent some formative years on the shores of Lake Michigan, though he didn’t speak as fondly of them. In a passage he later excised from Naked Lunch, he wrote, “There is something about Chicago that paralyzes the spirit under a dead weight of a formalism dictated by hoodlums, a hierarchy of decorticated wops . . . And everywhere the smell of atrophied gangsters, the dead weight of those dear dead days hanging in the air like rancid ectoplasm . . . You suffocate in the immediate past, still palpable, quivering like an earthbound ghost . . . Here the dream is suffocating, more real than the real, the past actually, incredibly, invading the present.”
After failed stints in grad school and the army (and a month in Bellevue for cutting off the tip of his own finger in a fit of jealousy), Burroughs returned to Illinois and enrolled at the Lewis School of Aeronautics, run by Catholic monks in Lockport, to get his pilot’s license. In the summer of 1942, he moved into a rooming house in Buena Park. He worked as an accounting clerk at a rubber plant, a fraud investigator, and an exterminator, according to Grauerholz’s research.
Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch from 1954-’58, while living in a rooming house in Tangier, Morocco. The novel careens through a series of nightmarish, orgiastic vignettes involving sexual and pharmaceutical exploration, brutality, double identities, and various kinds of domination. In 1958, portions of it were published by a University of Chicago student literary magazine, the Chicago Review. After Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley condemned the issue as “one of the foulest collections of printed filth I’ve seen publicly circulated,” the university suppressed it. Most of the editors resigned to found Big Table magazine, printing another excerpt in the inaugural issue. The Chicago post office seized all 10,000 copies, triggering an obscenity trial that attracted enough publicity to get the full manuscript of Naked Lunch published by Paris’s Olympia Press in 1959 (as The Naked Lunch) and launching Burroughs’s literary star. (This series of events is detailed in Gerald E. Brennan’s two-part 1995 Reader story “Naked Censorship.”)
In Lawrence, Burroughs lived on a steady diet of vodka Cokes—a drink someone in Leyser’s footage refers to as a “Burroughs”—and nursed his interests in guns and deadly snakes. He slept with a gun under his pillow and wore one on his belt when he went out. “Burroughs said a paranoid is someone who has all the facts,” Leyser notes. “Freud said a paranoid is a repressed homosexual. [Burroughs] was a deeply paranoid person. He believed all these guns would be a protection. He carried a cane that had a sword in it. He had blowguns and a throwing star.”
Upon earning his diploma in 2002, Leyser enrolled at Northern Illinois University, where he submitted Bill and Anna to the student film festival. “We submitted a version without nudity,” he says, “and slipped in the nudity before the film screened.” The movie was stopped, and the projectionist went on to the next film.
With Peter Weller, Bill Ayers, Penny Arcade, Hal Willner, James Grauerholz, Anne Waldman, John Giorno, John Long, Kurt Hemmer, and Tony Trigilio, music by Maya Jensen, and catering by David Leigh, Fri 8/28, 5:30 PM, Th!nkArt Salon, 1530 N. Paulina, suite F, 773-394-8170, $60 at burroughsthemovie.com, $75 at the door.
Afterparty
Featuring music by David Daniell & Douglas McCombs, Penny Arcade, and DJs, Fri 8/28, 9:30 PM, Stop Smiling, 1371 N. Milwaukee, free with admission to the Celebration, $10 without.
