Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Other friends met at John Burroughs included Rex Weisenberger, whose father was president of the National Association of Manufacturers. Bill often visited his home and knew his father. “He was a big fat man and successful and worked hard and right on cue dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-five leaving his widow with the money.” Bill and Rex did a trip to Europe and North Africa in 1933 and were close friends. It was at the John Burroughs School that Burroughs met his lifelong friend and the first love of his life, albeit unconsummated—Kells Elvins. Kells lived down the road from Bill on the corner of Price and Ladue Roads. “I just fell in love with him and everyone around school said, ‘Well, you’re his slave!’ ” Kells was a beautiful boy, very strong though not too athletic, with curly hair and brown eyes, “Just a beautiful kid with a terrific amount of élan. […] I was terribly obviously, in retrospect, attracted to him. He would take me on his lap and strum me like a banjo and I’d always get a hard-on.”11 Kells was entirely heterosexual but was prepared to tolerate Bill’s signs of affection, such as walking to school with his arm draped over his shoulder. Burroughs was fascinated by Kells’s parents, Lorrie “Lee” and Politte Elvins, because his father, who was an attorney, was clearly suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. Bill and Kells were greatly amused by Politte’s verbal incontinence, his rudeness and outrageous remarks. He was manic all the time, yelling and screaming. He once dumped a scrambled egg on the head of a waitress, claiming he’d ordered it fried. He was a tiny wreck of a man yet drove everywhere at ninety miles an hour. In Burroughs’s words, he was “a very crooked nasty lawyer, an anti-Semite. He said, ‘You know what I like about this place is the view,’ and the view was of the Jewish cemetery. He says, ‘I like to see it fill up!’ ”12 Elvins and Burroughs roomed together as postgraduates at Harvard. Later they went into business together as farmers in Texas, were neighbors in Mexico City, toured Morocco together, and Bill visited him in Denmark when Elvins was married to a Danish actress.

  “It was Lee Elvins who said I had the look of someone who would snap or take flight,” said Burroughs. “It was Lee Elvins who said, ‘That kid looks like a sheep-killin’ dog. He’s got an evasive, mean look.’ ”13 This phrase was taken up and run with by Burroughs, who used it in a number of texts. Burroughs remembered many of these cutting remarks for the rest of his life, and modified and repeated them until they were drained of venom by constant use. They made very good performance pieces. Another unkind remark, endlessly reworked by Burroughs, was made by Mrs. Senseney, the wife of the doctor who botched Bill’s tonsils, when Bill was thirteen. “She was a St. Louis matron, very poised and smug, very nasty. I was thin, she said to Dave Kammerer, ‘Well listen, if you want to get ahead socially, get rid of him, it’s a walking corpse!’ ‘It’s a walking corpse!’ she said. I said, when I heard of her death, ‘It isn’t every corpse than can walk. Her’s can’t.’ Old bitch.”14

  2. Meet the Johnson Family

  A whole beguiling new world was opened up for Burroughs when he read You Can’t Win by Jack Black, the autobiography of a former burglar, drug addict, and railroad hobo published in 1926. He had not known that such a life existed and was immediately intrigued. It had such a lasting impact upon him that he was able to quote passages verbatim fifty years later. It was set in that forgotten era between the days of the Wild West and the development of the big metropolitan cities, between the death of Jesse James and the rise of Al Capone. “It fascinated me and I thought it would be great to be a burglar. I saw all these furtive seedy rooming houses. I got so much from that book, Salt Chunk Mary was one of his characters. The whole idea of the Johnson Family comes from there.”15 He read and reread it, indulging in an adolescent nostalgie de la boue, longing for this other world of cheap hotels, smoky bars, pool halls, whorehouses, and opium dens, of cat burglars and hobo jungles. He wanted to be one of the Johnson Family, the good bums and thieves with a code of honorable conduct in direct contrast to the venal, corrupt, hypocritical behavior of people like Uncle Ivy or the parents of most of his friends. He became fascinated by gangsters and romanticized them. In a naïve attempt to emulate them Bill, Kells Elvins, and a friend, Richard Cameron, broke into an abandoned factory and smashed all the windows. They were caught and the man who owned the factory made a claim for damages amounting to about fifty dollars apiece. Bill’s father paid up, and Cameron’s father paid, but Politte contested the amount, insisting that the factory was already in decrepit condition, getting Kells to photograph the damage, and was so obdurate that the factory owner gave up.

  Bill continued to write stories, mostly lurid adventure tales of derring-do, gothic horror, or westerns that were read aloud in class. Sometimes he wrote more philosophical essays, such as his first published work, “Personal Magnetism,” which appeared in the February 1929 issue of the John Burroughs Review, about sending two dollars for instructions on “how to control others at a glance.” His interest in control systems appeared early on.

  The 1927 St. Louis tornado made a big impression on him. On September 29, the sky turned black and green and Bill was standing in the entrance to the boys’ locker room when he saw a bolt of lightning strike the cornice of the school, knocking off bricks. The children ran through the corridors, screaming hysterically. Then the phone calls from concerned parents began, but no one in the school was hurt. In St. Louis itself the scene was very different; seventy-nine people were killed and over 550 injured. The fronts were torn off whole rows of buildings, leaving their interiors exposed, cars were flipped over, trees uprooted, telephone poles became javelins as the tornado cut a swath through the West End. It was left looking like a scene from a Great War battlefront, with houses reduced to rubble and tram lines twisted into bizarre sculptures. James Grauerholz points out that tornadoes appear throughout Burroughs’s later work, “usually with a frisson of sexual excitement.”16

  That year Bill attended summer camp at Los Alamos with Mort, and they all made a family trip to France, staying in Paris, then spending two weeks in Cannes on the Riviera. Bill enjoyed himself immensely. It was his first trip abroad. The next year they remained in the States, with a family holiday in a rented house on the beach near La Jolla, California, and an extended period at the family summer cabin in St. Albans. As well as fishing, Bill was also keen on hunting for food: shooting quail or duck that he was going to eat was not a problem for him. Burroughs loved his food, and his books are filled with descriptions of meals and feasts: the fish he caught in Lake Huron; the preparation of a dish; how Virginia ham comes from hogs fed on peanuts; caviar. He became something of a gourmet.

  Bill and all of his friends had chemistry sets, wooden boxes with little compartments filled with chemicals. He would pour ammonia over iodide crystals to make ammonium iodide. This compound, when it dries, is so sensitive that a fly will explode it. “I remember how I used to while away the long 1920’s afternoons with sugar sprinkled around little heaps of ammonium iodide waiting for the flies to explode in little puffs of purple vapor.”17 Bill and his friends all made black powder, which they would put in boxes and throw, causing a loud explosion. When he was fourteen, he was at work in the basement of Price Road and had carefully packed a mixture of potassium chlorate and red phosphorus into a box. He was putting the top on when the friction caused the chemicals to explode, shredding his left hand. His father, who was working with his tools in the next room, rushed in, quickly wrapped his hand in a cloth, and drove him straight to the nearest hospital emergency room in University City. He was operated on by Dr. Masters, who spent two hours carefully removing the wooden splinters from his damaged hand. The injury was so serious that Bill remained in hospital for six weeks with his hands bandaged; in the days before penicillin there was a terrible danger of infection, which could have resulted in gangrene and amputation. Changing the dressings was terribly painful. Bill’s father came to see him every day. It was a bad injury, and Bill was exempt from gym and athletics for a year. Dr. Masters told Bill’s parents that he had give
n him “nearly an adult dose of morphine,” something that stuck in Bill’s mind.

  The explosion and hospitalization transformed Bill from being a very talkative boy to a very reserved one; a profound character change. This change suggests that six weeks of enforced idleness and boredom brought about a sudden self-awareness; most people have an adolescent epiphany, a conscious moment when they realize they are the person looking through their eyes at the world, that they are on a small planet revolving in the middle of infinity. Being alone in hospital appears to have undermined Bill’s unconditional acceptance of the all-encompassing bourgeois value system he grew up with. Suddenly finding himself outside it showed it was fallible and not permanent, fixed. He was alone with his thoughts, his experience of the green reindeer and his visions. He became afraid of the dark and kept a pair of brass knuckle dusters beneath his pillow at night. He always had sinus trouble and when he had a fever often saw animals in the wall; Laura thought nothing of this because she also had fever visions. In Burroughs’s own cosmology, the damage to his hand would have provided an entry port for the Ugly Spirit. Self-awareness came with recognition of the Ugly Spirit. It was, incidentally, the same hand that he later mutilated by cutting off part of his finger in a psychotic episode.

  The family had enjoyed themselves so much on their 1927 visit to France that in 1929 they did it again, in greater style. After staying in a luxury hotel in Paris they hired a touring car and a chauffeur and visited the sights. They toured the châteaux of the Loire, which Bill found boring, though some of them had moats where he could fish while his parents inspected the staterooms. They drove through the high Pyrenees and across to the Riviera, where they spent two weeks in a grand hotel on the Croisette in Cannes, where all Bill had to do was cross the road to the beach. He used to hire a kayak and row out to sea. In the evening they dined at all the expensive gourmet restaurants.

  Bill and Mort had attended the Los Alamos Ranch School summer camp for three years running, 1925, 1926, and 1927, so the school pitched for them to attend full-time. The director, Albert James Connell, spent much of his vacations traveling the country, meeting with parents, hoping to persuade them of the benefits of sending their boys to his rugged, outdoor-life school, which also happened to be the most expensive school in the United States: $2,400 a year, double the cost of the prestigious eastern schools. After three summers, Connell knew Bill’s parents quite well, which must be how he came to be left at Price Road with Bill when he was in St. Louis recruiting. Burroughs remembered an extraordinary story, which we must assume is true: “I was left in the rather dubious company of Mr. Connell. He says, ‘I’d like to see this gibbon stripped!’ In my own house. Nobody was there.” Bill obediently went to his room and took off his clothes. “God, it’s enough to make you puke when you think back on it.” Bill got a hard-on. “He wanted me to get a hard-on, so I did. He then says, ‘Do you play with it gibbon? Do you play with it till it goes off?’ and all this creepy talk, oh my God. He made no effort to touch my prick or anything like that. ‘Well, have you ever done this with other boys?’ And I hadn’t. But I remember after he left and everything, that I was thinking that idea of doing it with other boys would seem to me the most exciting thing. I remember I was coming back [from school] and I was walking up the hill and I got a hard-on thinking about it.”18

  In the summer of 1930, Bill, his father, and a guide made a canoe trip in Minnesota, up near the Canadian border, crossing through lakes, back and forth across the border, which was not controlled in those days, just fishing for bass and pike, exploring and seeing the sights. They continued on to Missoula, Montana, where they met up with some of Mote’s friends from St. Louis and then took a pack trip up into the mountains, once again with a guide, fly-fishing for Dolly Varden, a large salmon trout.19 Bill caught them up to six pounds. The fishing was too easy, since the streams had not been fished; he threw in his line and pulled out a fish. The limit then was twenty-five a day. He and his father built a smokehouse and smoked some of their catch, they had so many. Then, at the end of the summer, Bill was enrolled in Los Alamos Ranch School. He was sixteen.

  Chapter Four

  Far away and high on the mesa’s crest. Here’s the life that all of us love the best. Los Al-amos.

  —LOS ALAMOS RANCH SCHOOL SONG

  1. “I Know What’s Best for Boys!”

  “Boys become men more easily when separated from oversolicitous mothers” was the motto of Ashley Pond, who founded the Los Alamos Ranch School in 1917. Pond believed that the rough outdoor life was just what the pampered children of the rich needed. He was succeeded by Albert James Connell, known to everyone as “the Boss,” who recognized that these boys were not destined to be farmhands but to run the large prestigious corporations that their fathers owned, and that consequently the school should prepare them for the top universities. The boys stopped doing all the manual labor and staff was brought in to do it. Lawrence Hitchcock ran the academic program and Connell took care of business, recruitment, discipline, and field expeditions such as the overnight excursions to the high valleys and full-day Saturday trips. Connell discouraged married teachers—he wanted an all-male society—however, Pond’s daughter Peggy and her husband, the science teacher Fermor Church, lived there with their three children. Half the day was taken up by studies and the other half by scouting activities. Many of Connell’s ideas were taken on board by Burroughs, such as that there was no such thing as an accident: if something went wrong, it was someone’s fault, probably yours. As an adult Burroughs found amusement in Connell’s frequently used line, “I know what’s best for boys!”

  Every month all the boys were subject to naked physical examinations in the nurse’s office by two of the teachers. They were weighed and measured to see how much they had grown and to check their muscle tone. Connell took a close personal interest in this and was almost always there to supervise, touching their arms, chests, and buttocks though never anywhere else. His sexual interest in boys was generally recognized by the staff and boys, and many of the masters were concerned by it.1 “A closet queer, not so goddamn closet either. A. J. Connell. Confirmed bachelor my dear, confirmed. He had decided that this was all wrong. But he was very superior for having these tendencies and not giving in to them,”2 Burroughs opined.

  When they arrived at Lamy, New Mexico, the boys were met by the school station wagon and driven across the arroyo and up the switchback turns of the bumpy dirt road cut into the solid tuff of the canyon, emerging eventually on the Los Alamos mesa like something in a western movie. Los Alamos is named after the few cottonwood trees that manage to grow on the Pajarito Plateau (it translates as “little bird”), part of the volcanic Jemez mountain range. Gore Vidal, who attended Los Alamos ten years after Burroughs, wrote, “As they approached the top of the mesa, the road became narrow and rocky. Tall juniper bushes on every side and the air sage-scented.”3 The station wagon bumped across the desert, finally arriving at the Big House, a large three-story pine-log structure with a high roof and a veranda supported by smooth round wooden columns. In the distance the Sangre de Cristo Mountains glowed red in the lowering sun.

  New arrivals were weighed and inspected by Connell, who assigned them by size and physical development to one of the four patrols, Piñon, Juniper, Fir, and Spruce (older boys); forty-four boys altogether in khaki Boy Scout shirts and short shorts. There were three sleeping verandas on the top floor of the Big House, unheated roofless terraces where the boys slept all year round, with removable awnings that could be lowered in case of rain or snow and screens around them to stop wind. The nights were cool in summer but freezing in winter. There were shower stalls on the ground and third floor, but the boys dressed as soon as they got up and showered later, usually after being outside all day. There was just one toilet on each floor. Connell, Hitchcock, and a number of the other masters had rooms on the second floor of Fuller Lodge, but an unmarried master usually slept on each of the three porches with the boys. He did, however,
have an adjoining room to retreat to if he required privacy. Bill had a room that he shared with another boy in Spruce cottage with a sleeping porch attached, but sometimes up to eight boys could be sleeping on the porch.

  Lessons were held on the ground floor of the Big House. The ground floor of Fuller Lodge housed the kitchen and large dining room, one end of which had a stage for theatrical productions. Once a year they performed a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, which called for considerable rehearsal and stage work. Burroughs played the lead role of A. E. Scott-Fortescue, “the Toff,” in A Night at an Inn by Lord Dunsany. He particularly enjoyed it because he had to flourish his .32 revolver and act the hard man. Occasionally the room was cleared and the girls from Santa Fe’s Brownmoor School for Girls or from Bishop’s Lodge were invited up for a dance. There was a trading post that sold clothes, ammo, toiletries, and candy: Milky Way, Baby Ruth, Oh Henry!, Hershey Bars and Mars Bars and Denver Maid, chocolate with a pink crème center. O’Connell ordered Life Savers for the whole school by mail.