Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Burroughs’ brother, Mort, arrived from St. Louis, sent by their parents; Vollmer’s parents also showed up, and they departed with Julie, to raise her in New York State. They left Mort to arrange for their daughter’s burial, in the Pantéon Americano. After a tearful reconciliation with his brother William, Mort took his little nephew to live with Mote and Laura in St. Louis. Marker, Healy, and Woods were all in hiding from the Mexican cops, and they did not re-emerge until Jurado had coached them on what had happened. After some preliminary hearings, for which Jurado suborned the testimony of two ballistics witnesses, Burroughs’ case slipped into judicial limbo . . . but it could not remain there forever.

  Marker was at first solicitous of Burroughs, who fell ill after his release from prison, but he soon tired of their domestic situation, and left Mexico in January 1952 to return to his stateside haunts. Burroughs wrote long letters to Marker, but in his letters to Ginsberg, he complained of the boy’s silence. The Ecuador trip and his wife’s death had come when most of Burroughs’ writing on the first drafts of Junk was already finished; while he awaited judgment and sentencing, he turned his efforts to chronicling the affair with Marker (whom he called “Eugene Allerton”), as if somehow a book could explain the devastating thing that had happened. This new writing he thought of as Queer—which, in 1952, was a book title that no American publisher would touch.

  Around Christmas 1951, Burroughs learned of Phil White’s death in the Tombs, New York City’s municipal prison. Ginsberg conveyed Huncke’s account: White had informed on a friend and then, disgraced, hanged himself in his cell. Ginsberg also reported that he had failed to interest New Directions Press in publishing Burroughs’ junk memoirs. But Carl Solomon, long since discharged from Columbia Psychiatric and still in touch with Ginsberg, had been hired as an editor by his uncle, A. A. Wyn, a New York publisher whose imprint, Ace Books, was among the first to market pocket-sized, cheaply bound editions, or “paperbacks.” Solomon persuaded his uncle to give a contract to Ginsberg for Burroughs’ memoirs as a drug addict, to be bound together in a double book with an antinarcotics tract by a former drug agent, for “balance.” In April 1952, Wyn accepted Junk for publication. The title was changed to Junkie, and Ginsberg passed along Solomon’s request for an autobiographical Preface for the book.

  “Prologue,” the document Burroughs reluctantly produced, is an extraordinary confession. Using his mother’s maiden name for a pseudonym—“William Lee”—and changing certain names and places in his account to further obscure his identity, he tells his own story and gives us the keys to his intellectual development. He describes his early fascination with criminals, and his misadventures in that vein as a boy; he hints at his crush on Kells Elvins, and at the sexual torments of his Los Alamos days; and he gives a clear idea of his jaundiced attitude toward the twelve years of psychoanalysis he had undergone.

  Meanwhile, the final drafts of Junkie were now in the hands of Ginsberg and Solomon, and over Ginsberg’s objections, Wyn’s editors insisted on adding numerous “medical disclaimers” in the text, repudiating various comments by Burroughs as being contrary to “accepted medical authority.” These disclaimers were all removed when, in 1976, from a photocopy of the original typescript, Burroughs revised and de-expurgated the book, restoring a chapter about the Rio Grande Valley days and various passages late in the book and reverting to his own spelling of the title: Junky.

  Burroughs consciously allowed the influence of detective fiction, already evident in the “Hippos” manuscript, to guide his writing style in Junky. He tried to tell the facts of what had happened to him, what he had done, and most of all, what he had seen and heard. With unusual frankness, he told a plain, unvarnished tale of his addiction, and described his homosexual encounters, too. Many of the characters are familiar: “Herman” is Herbert Huncke (who never felt particularly flattered by this passage); “Roy” is Phil White, aka “The Sailor”; “Bill Gains” is William Garver; “Old Ike” is David Tesorero; “Lupita” is Lola la Chata; and “my old lady” is Joan Vollmer Burroughs. She appears only a handful of times, but always in a supportive light: helping Burroughs out of jail in New Orleans; trying to stop his runaway drug use in Mexico. At the end of the book, wrapping up his story, Burroughs writes: “My wife and I are separated.” This euphemism reflects his unwillingness to address the tragedy of her death.

  Burroughs was writing Queer when, in May 1952, Jack Kerouac arrived for a two-month visit and became his roommate at 210 Orizaba. Kerouac’s Doctor Sax was composed at this time. In Queer, Burroughs chose to cast his story in the third person—as befitted the shift in his own consciousness of himself from autobiographer to author—creating himself as the protagonist, “Lee.” Also during this year Burroughs began sleeping with a young Mexican boy named Angelo Porcayo, whom he always remembered as affectionate and uncomplicated. Perhaps this simpler arrangement aided Burroughs in showing himself, not as the cool, implacable narrator of Junky, but as the self-hating, desperate, inexplicably love-addled character “Lee.”

  That summer, Bill Garver arrived from the States and took a room in the Orizaba building. Kerouac and Burroughs were not domestically compatible, and Burroughs was relieved when Kerouac left in August. During the final editing stages of Junky, Ginsberg told Burroughs that Ace Books refused to include the homosexual material, and Burroughs abandoned the Queer manuscript just at the point where Marker had abandoned him: in Puyo, Ecuador. But he continued writing to Marker, in Florida, despite the absence of reply. Finally Marker came down to Mexico, in the fall of 1952. It was a short visit; Burroughs accompanied Marker to Jacksonville and Hollywood, Florida, where he met Eddie Woods and Betty Jones again. It was the end of Burroughs’ eighteen-month involvement with Lewis Marker.

  Burroughs went on to Palm Beach, Florida, where his parents had moved in 1952, to spend Christmas with them and his now five-year-old son, Billy. At about the same time, Bernabé Jurado fled Mexico to escape prosecution for shooting a teenaged boy who accidentally scratched his car. In his letters to Ginsberg, Burroughs talked of his plans to go back to Panama and South America very soon, and of his hopes, which would prove vain, that Marker would join him there. Although Burroughs couldn’t mention it to his parents, his first book, Junky, was scheduled for publication by Ace Books in New York the following summer. But he did tell them about his “research trip” to Puyo, and about his plans for the next trip. Mote and Laura agreed to underwrite their wayward son’s new expedition: to Colombia, South America. They did not know that the object of his quest was yagé.

  Burroughs set out in January 1953, and he wrote a continuous stream of letters back to Ginsberg during the seven-month trip. Marker’s disappearance created a void for Burroughs’ “routines,” and he was now writing primarily for Ginsberg’s edification and enjoyment. Through Harvard connections, Burroughs met the American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes (“Dr. Schindler”), who assisted him in his quest. After many further misadventures—including official detainment over an error in his travel papers and a few sexual encounters with light-fingered native boys—in the early summer, Burroughs finally located and partook of the yagé elixir, several times, in the Putumayo river town of Pucallpa. If he was searching for a drug that could heighten the telepathy between two kindred souls—such as himself and Marker, or Ginsberg—and bring them into psychic union, Burroughs found instead an intensely hallucinatory and solitary voyage inward.

  Transcribing his trip notes on a typewriter rented by the hour, Burroughs spent a few months in Lima, Peru. He was thirty-nine years old, an exile for the past five years, and about to be a published writer. He was finally reconciled to his homosexuality, but still seeking the perfectly telepathic partner, and his feelings for Ginsberg—whom he had treated condescendingly during the Columbia years, when Burroughs was thirty and Allen only eighteen—were now his primary emotional longing. In August he headed north from Lima, through Panama City and back to Mexico, and he sent Allen his last installment, a sho
rt piece he called “Mexico City Return.” In this text, Burroughs recounts asking people from the old Bounty gang for any news of Marker—while at the same time professing his new indifference, as shown by the “Skip Tracer” sequence that ends the piece.

  In 1984, the long-lost Queer manuscript became available again, and Burroughs agreed to revise the book for publication. The original text ended abruptly with the failure of his first yagé quest, and he needed something to give the book a better ending: “Mexico City Return” provided a dénouement. Burroughs also agreed to write a new introduction for Queer, but he found it difficult to face rereading the manuscript. He put it off, and eventually wrote a handful of notes—which did not seem sufficient for introducing this long-rumored and much-anticipated book. At his suggestion, I dipped into his letters to Kerouac and Ginsberg from the same period, and using them we cobbled together a broader Introduction.

  The portion of the Queer “Introduction” included here, however, is taken entirely from Burroughs’ new writings in early 1985. It is the part most commonly quoted, because in it Burroughs makes his first formal statement on Joan’s death and what it meant to him. Before then, in interviews, he would either tell the truth and change the subject, or—more often—pass off the old accidental-discharge lie fabricated for him by Jurado many years before.

  In September 1953 Burroughs finally quit Mexico and went to Palm Beach, where his parents were operating a small gift shop called Cobblestone Gardens and raising Billy, now six years old. Burroughs was with them only briefly; he soon left for Ginsberg’s New York apartment on East Seventh Street for their all-important reunion after six years apart. But Ginsberg had come into his own: no longer an impressionable teenager, he was now twenty-seven, and confident in his queer identity. Although he loved Burroughs, he did not want him for a lover. Somehow their friendship realigned itself, and they finished editing The Yagé Letters by the end of the year. The book was published ten years later, by City Lights, just after the U.S. publication of Naked Lunch in 1962 by Barney Rosset’s Grove Press.

  The Yagé Letters is not, strictly speaking, a collection of letters, but rather an epistolary novella, again substituting variations on Burroughs’ own biography, obscuring his past: Ohio for Missouri, Cincinnati for St. Louis. As Burroughs is now performing for Ginsberg, he is portraying himself in a tougher, more worldly light than his actual circumstances may have warranted. One can also see how pioneering was his interest in psychedelics (for example, he learns about “ololiuqui,” which in the 1960s would become known as “morning glory seeds,” containing lysergic compounds). But the most important development is the further entrance of Burroughs’ dreams into his writing, and his elaboration of the “routine” beyond the early form created for “Allerton’s” sake. In a letter from May 1953, Burroughs describes a dream of sailors wiping their asses with a treaty, and encloses the routine “Roosevelt After Inauguration.” City Lights’ printers in 1963 refused to include “Roosevelt” in the first edition of The Yagé Letters; the routine was first published by Ed Sanders’ Fuck You Press on the Lower East Side of New York in 1964; twenty years later, City Lights restored it to its edition.

  As for the publication of Junkie in the spring of 1953, it was not reviewed in print, nor was it expected to be; it did, however, confer a certain notoriety upon its author in the hipster circles of Greenwich Village, in places like the venerable San Remo Bar, which Burroughs and Ginsberg frequented at this time. And because the Ace Books double edition was among the very first wave of cheap, soft-cover pocket-sized paperbacks, the first six months of sales exceeded 113,000 copies. But with a royalty of only three cents per copy (regardless of the cover price), this did not earn much money for Burroughs.

  The yagé manuscript was finished, and Burroughs was ready to move on. He could not stay in New York with Ginsberg, now that he knew his desire was not reciprocated. A friend of Ginsberg’s named Alan Ansen (a Harvard man, younger than Burroughs) was heading to the Mediterranean in early 1954. Burroughs decided to accompany him; it would be his first return to the Continent in seventeen years. His past was littered with the failures of his loves and other efforts: his wife was dead, the Columbia circle was shattered, and almost all his former friends had left him. But he still had his parents’ allowance, and the knowledge that he had become a writer.

  from junky

  PROLOGUE

  I was born in 1914 in a solid, three-story, brick house in a large Midwest city. My parents were comfortable. My father owned and ran a lumber business. The house had a lawn in front, a back yard with a garden, a fish pond and a high wooden fence all around it. I remember the lamp-lighter lighting the gas streetlights and the huge, black, shiny Lincoln and drives in the park on Sunday. All the props of a safe, comfortable way of life that is now gone forever. I could put down one of those nostalgic routines about the old German doctor who lived next door and the rats running around in the back yard and my aunt’s electric car and my pet toad that lived by the fish pond.

  Actually my earliest memories are colored by a fear of nightmares. I was afraid to be alone, and afraid of the dark, and afraid to go to sleep because of dreams where a supernatural horror seemed always on the point of taking shape. I was afraid some day the dream would still be there when I woke up. I recall hearing a maid talk about opium and how smoking opium brings sweet dreams, and I said: “I will smoke opium when I grow up.”

  I was subject to hallucinations as a child. Once I woke up in the early morning light and saw little men playing in a block house I had made. I felt no fear, only a feeling of stillness and wonder. Another recurrent hallucination or nightmare concerned “animals in the wall,” and started with the delirium of a strange, undiagnosed fever that I had at the age of four or five.

  I went to a progressive school with the future solid citizens, the lawyers, doctors and businessmen of a large Midwest town. I was timid with the other children and afraid of physical violence. One aggressive little lesbian would pull my hair whenever she saw me. I would like to shove her face in right now, but she fell off a horse and broke her neck years ago.

  When I was about seven my parents decided to move to the suburbs “to get away from people.” They bought a large house with grounds and woods and a fish pond where there were squirrels instead of rats. They lived there in a comfortable capsule, with a beautiful garden and cut off from contact with the life of the city.

  I went to a private suburban high school. I was not conspicuously good or bad at sports, neither brilliant nor backward in studies. I had a definite blind spot for mathematics or anything mechanical. I never liked competitive team games and avoided these whenever possible. I became, in fact, a chronic malingerer. I did like fishing, hunting and hiking. I read more than was usual for an American boy of that time and place: Oscar Wilde, Anatole France, Baudelaire, even Gide. I formed a romantic attachment for another boy and we spent our Saturdays exploring old quarries, riding around on bicycles and fishing in ponds and rivers.

  At this time, I was greatly impressed by an autobiography of a burglar, called You Can’t Win. The author claimed to have spent a good part of his life in jail. It sounded good to me compared with the dullness of a Midwest suburb where all contact with life was shut out. I saw my friend as an ally, a partner in crime. We found an abandoned factory and broke all the windows and stole a chisel. We were caught, and our fathers had to pay the damages. After this my friend “packed me in” because the relationship was endangering his standing with the group. I saw there was no compromise possible with the group, the others, and I found myself a good deal alone.

  The environment was empty, the antagonist hidden, and I drifted into solo adventures. My criminal acts were gestures, unprofitable and for the most part unpunished. I would break into houses and walk around without taking anything. As a matter of fact, I had no need for money. Sometimes I would drive around in the country with a .22 rifle, shooting chickens. I made the roads unsafe with reckless driving until an accident
, from which I emerged miraculously and portentously unscratched, scared me into normal caution.

  I went to one of the Big Three universities, where I majored in English literature for lack of interest in any other subject. I hated the University and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The University was a fake English setup taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools. I was lonely. I knew no one, and strangers were regarded with distaste by the closed corporation of the desirables.

  By accident I met some rich homosexuals, of the international queer set who cruise around the world, bumping into each other in queer joints from New York to Cairo. I saw a way of life, a vocabulary, references, a whole symbol system, as the sociologists say. But these people were jerks for the most part and, after an initial period of fascination, I cooled off on the setup.

  When I graduated without honors, I had one hundred fifty dollars per month in trust. That was in the depression and there were no jobs and I couldn’t think of any job I wanted, in any case. I drifted around Europe for a year or so. Remnants of the postwar decay lingered in Europe. U.S. dollars could buy a good percentage of the inhabitants of Austria, male or female. That was in 1936, and the Nazis were closing in fast.

  I went back to the States. With my trust fund I could live without working or hustling. I was still cut off from life as I had been in the Midwest suburb. I fooled around taking graduate courses in psychology and jiu-jitsu lessons. I decided to undergo psychoanalysis, and continued with it for three years. Analysis removed inhibitions and anxiety so that I could live the way I wanted to live. Much of my progress in analysis was accomplished in spite of my analyst who did not like my “orientation,” as he called it. He finally abandoned analytic objectivity and put me down as an “out-and-out con.” I was more pleased with the results than he was.