by Barry Miles
Kammerer found himself a studio apartment in a rooming house at 48 Morton Street in the Village, working as a janitor in exchange for rent, and washing windows for a living. The building was shabby: steps led up to a double door with glass protected by an iron grille. Beyond this was a dirty hallway leading to a double French window. Kammerer’s room was large but low-ceilinged. A small writing table stood against another French window that looked out over a courtyard littered with old tin cans. At the other end of the room a comfortable sofa sat against an ugly black partition that separated off a kitchenette. There was a disused white icebox with its doors open to reveal empty whiskey and soda bottles. The sink was littered with can openers, half-eaten food, and strands of red hair. Adjacent to the sofa was a large open fireplace, packed high with newspapers, half-burnt wood, cigarette butts, and used matches. On the mantel was an open copy of Rimbaud in which was placed a small drawing of a dark windswept, swirling sea with a rock jutting out of the waves. Above the pillow on the bed, a strip of wallpaper had been torn away, and heavily penciled in the white plaster was the inscription “Lu-Dave.” Dave was very gregarious and quickly got to know a wide group of people, though his main purpose in being in New York was the pursuit of Lucien.
Burroughs found a place just around the corner from Dave at 69 Bedford Street, a three-story 1901 brownstone on what is now one of the most attractive streets in Greenwich Village. The comfortable living room was quite small and overlooked the street. It was furnished with a couch and a carefully selected library of about a hundred books. Burroughs always traveled light. He had a separate bedroom and a bathroom and there was a little walk-in kitchen with a fridge, work top, and gas stove, though Burroughs rarely ate in. Bill saw Kammerer almost every night for dinner and regarded him as his best friend. They would often be joined by Ruth Louise McMann, a lesbian who lived upstairs from Dave, who had joined their group. Burroughs described her to Allen Ginsberg as being “straightforward, manly, and reliable.”2
Also living in Kammerer’s rooming house was the novelist Chandler Brossard, a precocious literary talent who began writing for the New Yorker at the age of nineteen. His first book, Who Walk in Darkness, used his experiences in the bohemian Greenwich Village of the forties, but he denied that it was one of the first Beat Generation novels, saying it was closer to the French “New Wave.” Brossard saw Kammerer constantly and they were close friends. Bill would sometimes go with them to Brossard’s favorite French restaurant, Au Bon Pinard, which had a huge back room where people could dance. It was much frequented by French sailors and you could get a good dinner for $1.50. There Burroughs introduced Brossard to eating calf’s liver rare.
Burroughs quickly settled into something of a routine: drinks before dinner—Bill used to drink Dubonnet and soda in the summer, something stronger in winter—followed by wine with dinner. Lee Chumley’s, a former speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street, was just up the street from Bill’s. It was a literary bar, the walls lined with framed dust jackets of books written by its patrons, which included Cummings, Faulkner, O’Neill, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck. There was no exterior sign, and in Prohibition days customers entered through an unmarked entrance on Barrow Street, via a nondescript courtyard (the “garden door”). The term “86” originated when the police would give advance warning of a raid, telling Leland Chumley to “86” his customers, meaning they should leave through the Bedford Street door while the cops came in the garden door.
Being close to both Little Italy and to Chinatown, there was an abundance of cheap good local restaurants to choose from. Bill, Dave, and Louise particularly liked MacDougal’s on MacDougal Street, which was close by, and the Grand Ticino on Thompson for an inexpensive Italian meal. Wartime rationing—everyone had points—affected the menus of New York’s restaurants, and most set Tuesday and Friday apart as meatless days, but it was not yet law. Then there was Romany Marie’s at 64 Washington Square South at West 4th Street, where in addition to the usual fare, you could have your fortune told. She was famous for helping out struggling artists, writers, and scientists. R. Buckminster Fuller provided the stainless steel furniture and gave impromptu talks. Paul Robeson, Edgard Varèse, and Marsden Hartley were all regulars, as well as most of the early abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Joseph Stella, Stuart Davies, and Arshile Gorky. Bill liked to watch the sidewalk crap games in front of the café. “It requires a very quick mathematical mind.”3 He appears to have gambled there, remembering shortly before he died, “The vague watery blues of an old man’s eyes looking back to Romany Marie’s, and once I won a double—about $103. The bookie paid me with no smile.”4 Throughout his life, Burroughs was always drawn to European-style cafés and bars where he could make casual acquaintanceships and run into friends.
There was a good deal of drinking, mostly at the Minetta Tavern and the San Remo, both on nearby MacDougal Street. The Minetta had murals painted by Alex Katz, whom they got to know. He could always be found there in his smock and beret, drinking red wine, looking for commissions. They liked Minetta’s because there was a lot of meat in their spaghetti sauce, rare when meat was rationed. People sat around playing chess and drinking. Humphrey Bogart, who lived nearby, was a regular. The San Remo was more like a Village approximation of a Parisian literary bar with people flitting from booth to booth, and surly, sometimes violent waiters. At these two bars Burroughs ran into people like Maxwell Bodenheim and Joe Gould, whom he knew from his previous time in New York. He also saw Bill Gilmore, though he became increasingly irritated by Gilmore’s habit of leaving the table just before the check arrived. Though Burroughs had his allowance from his parents, he sometimes supplemented his income with occasional jobs. For a couple of weeks he worked as a bartender at Barrow’s Bar, a little hole-in-the-wall near Times Square named after the proprietor, but he did it mostly for the experience as he had plenty of money.
2. Derangement of All the Senses
It was through David Kammerer that Burroughs met Kerouac and Ginsberg. Lucien met Edie Parker in September 1943 at George Grosz’s life drawing class at Columbia. She was from Grosse Point, Michigan, where her father had a Packard dealership and her mother owned a chain of shoe stores. Edie found Lucien very attractive; she couldn’t keep her eyes off of him. The other girls felt the same way. “I was spellbound by him; he moved like a cat. His movements were like mercury over rocks. His eyes were slanted, almost oriental, and pure green, so green they dazzled you. Above all, he was unaware of the effect he had on the girls, which made him all the more attractive.”5
Although Edie found Lucien to be arrogant, sarcastic, and precocious, he was from the same wealthy background as her and they quickly became friends. She invited him back to her nearby apartment. Carr described her as “birdlike, cheerful, one of the boys, a lot of fun to be with. […] Full of the excitement of life,” and he was soon stopping by to take a shower or make himself a snack in between classes. He heard all about her boyfriend, an ex-Columbia student named Jack Kerouac, who was away at sea in the merchant marine shipping war materiel to Liverpool. Lucien introduced Edie to his girlfriend, Celine Young, from Westchester. She was half French—her mother was from Alsace—and Carr described her as having “long blonde hair, built like a brick shithouse, regal carriage.” Edie was more complimentary: “We had the same background and we dressed the same way […] had nice boobs, solidly built. Celine had a shining glow to her complexion. Her greatest asset was her gorgeous, slightly curly, natural blond hair. […] Celine, like anyone who is attractive and has the world by the tail, loved to flirt. She had big blue eyes and was full of energy and fun. That’s why Lucien adored her so much.”6
Edie lived at 421 West 118th Street, in the single block between Morningside Park and the Columbia University campus. The stairs were at the back of the building; there were two apartments on each floor, and number 62 was on the top floor at the back. There was no elevator. The flat was huge, with six rooms. A long corridor led past the kitchen to a small bedroo
m, then passed a large white-tiled bathroom containing a huge freestanding bathtub and on to another, larger bedroom. A pair of sliding wooden doors opened into a sunny double-sized living room. The rent was forty-two dollars a month plus utilities, split between Edie and her roommate, Joan Vollmer, who had recently graduated from studying journalism at Barnard.
Joan was born on February 4, 1923, in Ossining, Westchester, New York, and raised in Loudonville, an exclusive suburb north of Albany. She was thin, with an oval, slightly heart-shaped face, fine features, fluffy brown hair, and pale blue eyes.7 Edie described her as “Dutch-looking”—the name Vollmer is of Dutch origin—and said she was “the type of person that her personality made you think was beautiful. She had heavy legs and when she walked her calves would wiggle.” Burroughs described her as “pretty, but not striking looking.” She went to St. Agnes High School in Albany and graduated from Barnard College. She was married to a Columbia law student, Paul Adams, who was now in the army, doing basic training in Mississippi. She had regretted the marriage from the very first day. Though technically married, they were no longer a couple. She did, however, receive his military allotment checks, which, in addition to a generous allowance from her father, allowed her to live well. Her father, David Vollmer, was the manager of the Gevaert photographic film factory. It had been sold to him for a nominal fee, but the Alien Property Custodian agency seized it in 1941 because there was no clear proof that there was a separation of interests from the original German owners. Joan had been overprotected by her father when she was younger; no matter where she went, he would follow her in his car. Adams was her second marriage. Burroughs told Ted Morgan, “She had been married twice, as a matter of fact, and she hated both husbands. She married them and then hated them, for the simple reason that they were ordinary stupid people, way below her level. She was about seventeen when she married the first time.”8
Each day she bought a half dozen daily newspapers9 and studied them while relaxing in a perfumed bubble bath. There she received any visitors who might stop by and discussed the papers’ treatment of the progress of the war as the pages grew soggy and wet from the bubbles. She read slowly and thoroughly, as Edie said, “savoring every moment.” In those days Joan dressed fashionably and enjoyed a complicated love life.
In November 1943, when Edie and Joan still had their previous apartment at 420 West 119th Street, apartment 28, Joan discovered she was pregnant. The child’s father has been variously named by Edie Parker as Herbert Kiesewetter, a fellow student, and by Lucien Carr as John L. “Fitz” Fitzgerald, from Poughkeepsie, with whom she had an affair around that time (he is called “Fitzpatrick” in Kerouac’s books). Fitz’s best friend, also from Poughkeepsie, was a tall, large, silent man named Duncan Purcell, known to the group as Uncle Dunc. As Edie Parker put it, “Uncle Dunc was very fond of Joan. The two would discuss Freud, Kafka, Marx and politics over kummel and listen to Bach.”10 Allen Ginsberg once indicated that Dunc might have been the child’s father.11
It was difficult to get an abortion in those days and Joan was frantic. She decided that she had better get Paul Adams back, as they were still married, and have sex with him in order to pretend that the child was his in order to give it some security. She talked it over with her friends Geraldine Lust, Ruth Clark, and Edie, and came up with a bizarre plan. She thought that if she pretended to go crazy, he would come back and reclaim her. They took her to Times Square and Joan walked in the rain with one foot in the gutter and the other on the sidewalk, then sat propped up outside a Horn & Hardart cafeteria, playing with her hair, talking to herself, and acting really goofy, all the time being watched from across the street by Edie, Ruth, and Geraldine. After a while someone reported her and people from Bellevue arrived and took her away in an ambulance. Edie went to visit the next day: Paul Adams had been telephoned and was on his way with two weeks’ furlough. She told him that she had gone crazy because she missed him so much. He took her back to the apartment that she and Edie then shared on West 119th Street and they were temporarily reconciled. Joan returned to Albany to have her child and on June 24, 1944, gave birth to Julie.
In the meantime, Edie and Joan spent a lot of time at the West End Bar on Broadway, which although it was across the street from Columbia at 113th Street, was mostly full of seamen, Native Americans (who lived nearby), and local lowlifes instead of college students. There were a lot of young war wives whose men were in training or fighting overseas. The white-tiled floor was sprinkled with sawdust and there was a row of dark wooden booths across from the bar that seated six, or eight if they crowded up. Bill the bartender parked his motorcycle outside when he was on duty. He enjoyed talking with the students and always remembered to give them their fourth drink free. The other bartender was a right-wing Irish Catholic named Johnny who regarded all students as communists but would give them free meals if they looked hungry. Among the regulars was a woman dressed entirely in black who sat motionless in the same place at the bar every evening saying nothing and a hooker who stopped by for a couple of hours a night to play the jukebox. There was a cafeteria to the left of the entrance with inexpensive steam tables of mashed potatoes, corned beef, knockwurst, and cabbage, run by a prickly Dane named Otto. Lucien Carr remembered that Edie drank with a whole series of men at the West End, including a huge Manhattan Indian who used to get “drunk as he could possibly get.”12 Everyone called him Chief, and he felt very protective toward Edie and her friends: if anyone caused them trouble, Chief would pick them up bodily and smash them down on the floor.
A few days before Christmas 1943, Lucien Carr was in his room on the seventh floor of the Union Theological Seminary. Most of the boarders had gone home for the vacation, so he was surprised when someone knocked at his door. He had been playing music and it was a stranger from down the hall, wanting to know what he was playing. “I thought it might be the Brahms Trio No. 1,” ventured the young Allen Ginsberg.13
“Well, well! A little oasis in this wasteland,” exclaimed Carr, and invited him in. Ginsberg was seventeen and was enrolled in pre-law at Columbia, intending to be a labor lawyer. He was skinny with large lips, sticking-out ears, and thick horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He was intrigued by the contents of Carr’s room: on the walls were prints of The Bohemian Girl by Franz Hals, The Sleeping Gypsy by Rousseau, and a Cézanne landscape. The bookcase contained Flaubert, a critique of Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer, all in French, as well as a worn copy of Spinoza’s Ethics and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure—all heady stuff for Ginsberg. Lucien opened a bottle of Burgundy, filled two glasses, and they began to talk. Allen thought that he was “the most angelic-looking kid I ever saw, with blond hair, pale and ‘hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind and took a mess of shadows for its meat.’ ”14 It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
Lucien took Allen on his first ever excursion to Greenwich Village, visiting both David Kammerer and the Minetta Tavern. Ginsberg was in heaven: “It was an un-charted, historic no-man’s-land wilderness to me, particularly entrancing as I was a closet queen and had not come out yet, so going down to the Village, where all the fairies were, but in disguise, with a beautiful friend, it was both romantically glorious and at the same time completely repressed, frightening, and frustrating.”15
A few days after Christmas they made another trip to see Kammerer. This time Burroughs was visiting, lying sprawled across the sofa. Bill had no enduring first impression of Ginsberg, who was shy and hardly said a word. Ginsberg, however, remembered the visit with clarity. Carr described how he had provoked a fight between Kammerer and a gay portrait painter at the artist’s Village studio a few days earlier, during which the studio had been totally demolished. Lucien had bitten off part of the painter’s earlobe and had sunk his teeth into Kammerer’s shoulder. Burroughs was censorious: “In the words of the immortal bard, ‘’tis too starved a subject for my sword.’ ”16 Ginsberg was amazed, never having heard anyone quote Shakespeare in everyday conversation bef
ore. In fact it was one of Bill’s favorite expressions, one he used frequently.
Lucien’s exploits have become part of Beat Generation lore: how he pulled the plugs from a row of yachts and sank them; how he threw a veal parmigiana over his shoulder at the Minetta Tavern, saying, “This is crap,” and the waiters rushed to clear up the mess without remonstrating with him; how he stole a cape and a large upright vacuum cleaner from backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House after seeing the Royal Ballet17 perform Swan Lake; and the time he spotted a hole in Bill’s seersucker suit, stuck in his finger, and tore the whole suit apart. With Kammerer joining in they tore the jacket into strips, which they tied together and festooned around the room like bunting while Burroughs tut-tutted. Once when Bill was cooking a large steak for four of them, Lucien grabbed it from the pan before Bill could divide it into portions and began gnawing at it, blood running down his face. Naturally, Kammerer quickly joined in. Lucien was a natural leader, but also a disagreeable drunk and loud and insistent in arguments. His emotional and intellectual balance had been distorted throughout his adolescence by the continuous presence of David Kammerer, whom he was both trying to impress and break away from. At that time he was very influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, as were they all:
The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love, suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one—and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown!18
