Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Lucien’s father, Russell Carr, had walked out on his family when the boy was only two years old, and Lucien had been very young when he died so he never knew him. Lucien was a child looking for a father figure and was flattered by Kammerer’s attention. He used to visit Kammerer at home, and Lucien’s mother, Marion Gratz—she reverted to her maiden name after divorcing Lucien’s father—welcomed him into the household. Kammerer restrained himself for some time, until Lucien was fourteen, when he and Kammerer spent the summer together in Mexico. As David was a scout leader, Marion Gratz saw nothing wrong in this in those pre-Freudian days before World War II. It was in Mexico that Kammerer revealed his feelings toward Lucien. Lucien, shocked and confused, rejected him.18

  Lucien felt that his friendship had been betrayed by the older man, and Kammerer told Bill that Lucien never once allowed him to do anything sexually. Lucien sometimes taunted Kammerer over his obsession. On one occasion in St. Louis, when Lucien was fifteen or sixteen, Bill, Lucien, and David visited someone’s empty house. Bill and Lucien got under the rug and Bill began kissing him and feeling him up while David stood across the room, wringing his hands in despair. “Lucien was just taunting him,” Burroughs said. “We didn’t really make it, but it just drove Dave crazy. If you give a young boy an opportunity to be cruel, he’ll sure as hell take it all the way. Lucien was a very attractive boy. I would have been pleased to make it with him.”19 Bill may have been attributing too worldly an interpretation to Lucien’s rough-and-tumble games. Speaking about Bill’s homosexuality, Carr said later, “He was very deceptive. Either that or I was very naïve. When I’d known Burroughs in St. Louis he was chasing after girls, as far as I know. He had one lovely affair going with some woman. I spent a long time before I realized that Burroughs was into homosexuality. Allen probably told me as a matter of fact. I think I was sort of naïve on the subject. I don’t think I really realized what Burroughs was into until, God, after Joan was dead!”20 In Howard Brookner’s Burroughs documentary, Lucien Carr remembered Bill as a womanizer and Bill concurred:

  Lucien Carr: “I was just thinking of Willie in the old days when Willie was more robust of figure and used to speak of a thunder in his chest as he chased skirts around St. Louis.”

  WSB: “Yes, I used to be quite a woman chaser.”

  Allen Ginsberg: “You were!?”

  LC: “Oh, Willie the lover, I’ll tell you. There was a line that always got ’em. He tore open his shirt screaming, ‘There’s a thunder in my breast’ and they all fell flat on their backs!”

  WSB: “Every time!”

  Burroughs later said, “It is quite true that I did try to lay this girl and nothing happened really, but, ‘Thunder in my chest,’ that was something that Lucien concocted. I might have said it, who knows. It was a joke.”21 However, stories still circulate about Burroughs in St. Louis. One New York editor from St. Louis remembered that Burroughs would drive across their lawn, leaving great skid marks, when he picked up the young lady of the house.22

  Lucien Carr told Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee how he first became friends with Burroughs. He was very young and wanted to visit the whores in East St. Louis. He borrowed Bill’s 1938 Ford. It was the middle of winter, and when Lucien was through at the brothel he returned to the car, which was ice-cold. He revved the engine to get it hot. “I was gonna get it warm in there. Until the fucking front of the car exploded!” The car was destroyed. Lucien and his friends found a hotel and got back across the river in the morning. After about a week he thought he should tell Bill that his car was totaled and abandoned across the river:

  So I call him, and I say, “Hey Bill, you know your car…”

  And he says, “Yasss—”

  I said, “Well, let’s see. I had it across the river, and I think I blew the head off it, anyway it all came flying out the hood, and… it’s over there and I don’t think it’s worth goin’ over to pick up.”

  And he said, “All right.”

  And I said, “Well I thought I better tell you,” and he said, “Fine”—Click, click. Hang up. And that was it.

  But later the word got back to me that Burroughs really appreciated that I hadn’t bothered to apologize. I really didn’t feel any apology. I thought I oughta tell the guy where his car was—y’know? Ever since then Burroughs and I have been real friends.23

  4. A Very Private Pilot

  With a war appearing inevitable, Burroughs decided to get a pilot’s license. He had wanted to go into commercial aviation but could only get a private license because his eyesight wasn’t good enough without corrective glasses, but he thought that if the United States joined the war the standards would be relaxed a little. In the spring of 1941 he enrolled at the Lewis School of Aeronautics in Lockport, Illinois, and lived in the school near Joliet. The academy was run by a dozen Catholic Brothers and had started life as the Holy Name Technical School, designed to train wayward boys from Chicago for a profession. With the war approaching they began to emphasize programs that might be of direct use to the armed forces. While Bill was in Joliet, he transferred his psychoanalysis to Dr. Edoardo Weiss at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. Once a week he sped, “doing a hundred on the level,” in his black V8 Ford to downtown Chicago to see Dr. Weiss after lessons, returning the same night. Sometimes Bill would take some of the boys from the dormitory where he slept with him to Chicago and “go to a massage parlor and get laid, get jacked off.”24

  He flew Piper Cubs, which cruise at sixty miles per hour. They land at about twenty-eight miles per hour, so if they crash there is a good chance of walking away. He enjoyed it and found it not much more difficult than driving a car, although a completely different operation. He had good coordination and became reasonably competent at it. The school also had gliders, a subject that crops up in Burroughs’s work, but he doesn’t seem to have actually flown one. The instructor has to decide when the pupil is ready to solo. In Bill’s case he’d had ten hours of dual flying when the instructor told him to take it up. After flying for at least one hundred hours he could take the examination. His instructor knew what questions would be asked and trained him in dead reckoning and the other essentials. Bill passed it the first time and got his Class A pilot’s license. The course took three months and he did some flying after that. Regulations did change a bit during the war, but Bill never met military requirements and was unable to fly for his country.

  Determined to join the war, he got a letter of recommendation to Colonel Donovan from his uncle James Wideman Lee. Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed Colonel William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan as the “Coordinator of Information” in July 1941 because the United States did not have an intelligence agency. The CoI was based on the British Secret Service and Special Operations Executive and was transformed into the Office of Strategic Services in June 1942, the forerunner of the CIA. Burroughs got on well with Donovan, who said, “We can use this guy,” and sent him down to see the head of recruitment. It turned out to be Baxter, Bill’s old housemaster from Adams House at Harvard. He was a big man with a black mustache and purple cheeks. Bill had never liked Baxter, and Baxter just hated Bill. Bill took one look at him and knew he didn’t stand a chance of being recruited. It was another road not traveled; instead of writing The Naked Lunch, Burroughs might have been head of the CIA.

  In New York, before the finger incident, Burroughs had tried unsuccessfully to get a job, usually sabotaging the effort by turning up unshaven or late. Now his father stepped in, calling in a favor from a friend in New York. Lieutenant Colonel Massek had known Bill’s father in St. Louis. Mortimer asked him to give Bill a job with his advertising agency Van Dolen, Givaudan & Massek. Bill returned to New York in September 1941. Bill liked Colonel Massek very much; like Bill he was a confirmed atheist and they used to go out drinking together. Bill was hired as a copywriter. His memorable campaign was for Cascade, a high colonic consisting of a bag that the customer filled with a special mixture. Bill wrote the copy. He explained:

 
It had a nickel in the middle, so you stick the nickel up your ass and sit down on the bag and it’s something like a hot water bottle. Your weight forces all the liquid up. Its an enema: “But it’s no more like an enema than a kite is like an aeroplane. ‘Well done thou true and faithful servant,’ that is how many people feel about their Cascade. Sometimes immeasurable relief sweeps over them as waste matter that has accumulated for years is swept away. You feel as if reborn.” Which is absolutely crap. Unfortunately some 300lb woman sat down on this bloody thing and her guts burst open. That wasn’t good. Little trouble with interstate commerce at that point.

  Bill’s parents were still very concerned for his welfare and made sure he lived comfortably. They installed him in a luxurious apartment on West 11th Street in the West Village. It was small but had a compact kitchen, a bathroom, and two comfortable beds; everything Bill could want. “My parents were paying the rent. They always did these things. This is terrible for me to think about it. The point is they gave me a hell of a lot. I gave them fuck all! That’s all. No use pussyfooting around when you know you’ve been a miserable bastard and say that you’re anything else.” He felt guilty about living off them, but also hated them for the control it gave them over him. The guilt stayed with him for the rest of his life.

  Burroughs started psychoanalysis with Dr. Emmeline Place Hayward but soon reached an impasse because Dr. Hayward objected to the early hour that Bill wanted. After three months he transferred to Dr. Spitz, with whom he had a much better relationship. He stayed with Dr. Spitz until April 1942, and Gilmore and Bill’s other friends said that Bill became distinctly more sociable during this period.

  On arrival in New York he immediately invited Jack Anderson to live with him. It was one of the few times in his life that Burroughs shared a bedroom with anyone. But within a few days of their being together, Bill found that his sexual attachment to Jack was over. At some point, probably at this time when his emotions had subsided, Bill had a threesome with Jack and his girlfriend. After the initial reunion, Burroughs and Anderson had no more sexual relations; however, Bill felt obliged to continue to share the apartment with him. Jack was afraid to be in a room alone at night; it gave him hallucinations and nightmares. Still, life was pleasant. They would eat out at various places around the Village, Chumley’s on Bedford Street in particular. Jack was working as an office boy and Bill was earning thirty dollars a week, so between them they had enough money to live very well. As time went by, Anderson began to show signs of mental instability and became unemployable. Burroughs wanted out, but felt a peculiar obligation to Anderson. In April 1942 Bill developed a case of jaundice and was advised to return to St. Louis. There his physician at Washington University diagnosed acute infectious mononucleosis. Burroughs often ended relationships by running away. He would leave the flat, keep paying for it, and consider the case closed. When he stopped paying the rent, it became someone’s else’s problem to evict the tenant.

  In the meantime, America was attacked at Pearl Harbor and joined the war. Bill, with his pilot’s license, applied to join the newly formed Glider Corps, but he was rejected because he did not have 20/20 vision. He had earlier applied as a volunteer ambulance driver to the American Field Service when they were sending units to France before Dunkirk, but he was rejected: “this snotty English school tie says, ‘Oh, uh, by the way Burroughs, what were your clubs at Harvard? No clubs?’ He goes all dim and grey like the room was full of fog. ‘We’ll consider your application…’ ”25 He applied for a naval commission. At his physical examination the doctor told the nurse to write, “His feet are flat, his eyesight bad, and put down that he is a poor physical specimen.”26 The doctor said to him aside, “You may get your commission, if you can throw some weight around.” But Bill didn’t have the weight.

  In May, when he recovered from his mononucleosis, in an attempt to escape from his parents and break from Jack, he went to Jefferson Barracks and enrolled. They gave him a very cursory examination and certified him 1A. “They took me, I did not think they would.”27 He was billeted at the barracks, on the west bank of the Mississippi, just south of St. Louis. As soon as he realized what he had done he looked for a way out. He had volunteered as an officer and been rejected so he didn’t see why he should serve as a private. “I liked the idea of danger and killing and living in a very alert fashion. But I am not self-destructive at all. If I find that things are not working, I will find a way out.” On his first two-day leave he explained his problem to his mother, who took him to see Dr. John C. Whitehorn, Bill’s psychoanalyst until January 1941. Whitehorn had a well-connected friend, Dr. David McKenzie Rioch at the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Washington University. Rioch had a private practice. He was a huge man who looked like Alfred Hitchcock and had a commanding presence. He sent to Payne Whitney for Bill’s papers, and consulted with Lieutenant Colonel J. R. McDowell, the medical officer at Jefferson. Bill was admitted to the post hospital to await his honorable discharge. The paperwork took about four months to go through. In the meantime Bill was excused from any military duties and spent his time reading the complete C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past that he found in the camp library. He thought it was a great work.

  He had nothing to do. He sat around playing poker, walked around the grounds, and stared out at the Mississippi. He had his own little food club. He made friends with four or five people who were also awaiting their discharge papers, and his parents would drive out with food for them all. One of his new friends was Ray Masterson from Chicago, who was the same age as Bill. Like Jack Anderson, Masterson had been arrested when he was young and spent six months in jail, which may have been why he was being discharged. He told Bill lurid stories about the Chicago criminal underworld, lowlife, unsuccessful burglars, characters out of Jack Black’s You Can’t Win.

  Bill left the army in the summer of 1942 with an honorable discharge, entitling him to veterans’ benefits but no pension. By now his parents expected nothing of him; all they required was that he continue his psychoanalysis, which they paid for. This was when they fixed the monthly allowance that he lived on until he was fifty years old. Dr. Rioch did not treat people himself, but he was connected with Chestnut Lodge, a well-known sanatorium in Rockville, Maryland, as well as with the Washington school of psychoanalysis started by Harry Stack Sullivan. Dr. Rioch and Bill’s mother both felt that he should undergo analysis at Chestnut Lodge.

  Bill went out to talk to the doctors and stayed there three days. They considered a year to be more or less the minimum time needed for a complete analysis. Patients could stay at Chestnut Lodge, which had previously been a large hotel, or in D.C. or Baltimore. Bill decided against it. “Obviously there was something wrong psychically, but I just didn’t want to do it. I would say I needed it. I really feel that the people at Chestnut Lodge were a great deal better than the others that I had. I might have benefited.”28 Rioch was very much into behavior modification techniques. In retrospect Burroughs considered he may have had a lucky escape. “Who knows what I might have lost? I might never have written at all, I might never have gotten into this whole situation that led to Junky or addiction or Naked Lunch. None of that might have happened. It was one of those points at which a decision is made, the road not taken.”29 More than half a century later Burroughs mused, “Back at Chestnut Lodge. If I had stayed? Where would I be now?”30

  Burroughs had tried to serve his country: “Before Pearl Harbor I wanted to be in the fuckin’ army, I wanted to do some fighting.” He didn’t care too much who was giving the orders but would just as soon be giving them himself. He thought the war would shake him out of his lethargy. But he was not permitted to fly into combat with a glider full of raw troops, or to be a naval officer. They didn’t want him as a spy nor even as an ambulance driver. As James Grauerholz put it, “If the regular army showed him no respect and tossed him out for being an obsessive, self-mutilating homo—then he would be a queer gangster. And would
show them.”31 He moved to Chicago to join the lowlife that Ray Masterton had told him about.

  Chapter Eight

  Everywhere the smell of atrophied gangsters.1

  1. Mrs. Murphy’s Rooming House2

  Burroughs arrived in Chicago in the autumn of 1942 and found a room in the Buena Apartments at 4144 North Kenmore Street, managed by Mrs. Hattie Murphy, a “set” known in Burroughs’s books simply as “Mrs. Murphy’s Rooming House.” It was one of the old-style wooden Chicago buildings with three wooden porches above each other at the back, overlooking the elevated rail line on the eastern edge of the Graceland Cemetery. It appears to have had sixteen apartments in all. “Mrs. Murphy’s rooming house remember red-brick building on a corner of the alley there it is just ahead Rooms to Let curtain grey as orphanage sugar a grey shadow always peeking out she opens the door a crack.”3

  Bill met up with Ray Masterson, who was newly married but appears to have been sexually involved with Burroughs, at least in the opinion of his wife. Burroughs told Ted Morgan:

  He wanted to stay over at my place to avoid going home to avoid having this shrew leap upon him, so she said, “You’re having an affair with him! God, you’re keeping him there, living with you.”

  “I’m not keeping him here, for God’s sake.”

  “Living with you!”

  I said, “Look, he’s a grown man. He can walk out of here anytime he wants to. He just wants to stay over probably because he can’t stand you!” She just went hysterical, berserk with that, screaming, “I’m coming over there with the cops” and all this kind of stuff. It was ridiculous.…

  She didn’t come. She hated me, she kept saying, “I hope he dies, I hope he gets torn in pieces.”4