Call Me Burroughs
Page 15
Looking back, Lucien Carr considered, “It’s a wonder they didn’t throw us all out of Union Theological Seminary, because our pastimes there were to unroll the fire hose from the top floor, drop it down the stairwell, and turn it on, full blast; to start fires in the incinerator shed; all those things naughty college boys do.”19
Lucien was often at the West End with Celine Young, but the only way they could escape from Kammerer was to spend their nights together at Edie’s apartment at 421 West 118th Street, sleeping on the couch in the living room. When Kerouac returned from sea in June 1944, he was initially, and understandably, very suspicious of Lucien, and when he first saw him in the West End he told Edie, “Looks to me like a mischievous little prick,”20 but the two of them became immediate friends and drinking buddies. In Vanity of Duluoz, the most fictionalized of his memoir books, Kerouac describes their meeting:
That first night we got really drunk and I don’t know whether it was that first night or not, it was, when he told me to get into an empty barrel and then proceeded to roll the barrel down the sidewalks of Upper Broadway. A few nights later I do remember we sat in puddles of rain together in a crashing downpour and poured black ink over our hair. […] I got to like him more and more.21
Jack Kerouac brought energy and boundless enthusiasm to the group, and he also provided its literary direction. He loved jazz and could accurately scat-sing instrumental solos such as “Lester Leaps In” and “Lady Be Good” by Lester Young. He and Edie had lived together, on and off, since 1940. He was stocky, solidly built, with dark, brooding Breton good looks. Ginsberg, when he finally met him, found him physically very attractive and admired his “sturdy peasant build.” Jack’s parents were from Quebec, but he was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. He grew up speaking French joual, the French of the Canucks, with English as his second language, and throughout his life always spoke to his mother in patois. He had been a football hero at Lowell High, and went to Columbia on a football scholarship after spending a year at Horace Mann Prep to bring him up to Columbia’s entry standards. At Columbia he argued with the coach, Lou Little, and his standing was not improved when his father came to the college and informed Little that a “cabal of kikes and commies” were controlling the school. Jack flunked out with a leg injury and in December 1942 enlisted in the U.S. Navy. This didn’t work out, so he joined the merchant marine, and he was still a seaman when Lucien first met him. But all this came second to his writing. He had a notebook with him at all times and at school he had been nicknamed “Memory Babe” for his prodigious ability to remember whole paragraphs from books, as well as every significant move in a football game. In addition to drinking, he and Lucien discussed writing and literature. As Lucien Carr explained it, comparing his relationship with Jack to Allen Ginsberg’s:
I’d read a lot more books than Jack so I introduced him to a lot of people like Rimbaud, so he always had a great respect for me, which was probably undue, but nonetheless was there. I think Jack and I had a similar love for the English language in a way that Allen doesn’t have. As far as language went their communality of language was more in terms of bop-prosody and all this kind of bullshit. Jack was a true genius when it comes to the language. He had a real feel for it. The difference is really that Jack and I shared Shakespeare, say, where Jack and Allen shared Blake.22
Burroughs met Kerouac through Lucien, who told him all about this good-looking, hard-drinking, literary seaman who could quote Thomas Wolfe. Perhaps inspired by the D-Day landings in June, Bill wanted to get merchant marine papers in order to ship out. One afternoon in July 1944, he paid Kerouac a visit to find out how to do it. Bill was accompanied by David Kammerer, who had already met Jack at the West End. They arrived at Kerouac’s door just as he had taken a shower. Kerouac lounged in an easy chair wearing just his pants while Bill perched on a hassock in the middle of the living room. Bill’s first impressions were not strong enough to stay with him, but he recalled that “Kerouac looked like an athlete, good-looking in a sort of a heavy masculine way.”23 He was not really Bill’s type. Kerouac, however, remembered the meeting in enormous detail and devoted several pages of Vanity of Duluoz to it, providing a picture of how Burroughs looked at the time:
Tall and bespectacled and thin in a seersucker suit […] strange, inscrutable because ordinary looking (scrutable), like a shy bank clerk with a patrician thinlipped cold bluelipped face, blue eyes saying nothing behind steel rims and glass, sandy hair, a little wispy, a little of the wistful German Nazi youth as his soft hair fluffles in the breeze.24
Allen Ginsberg, meanwhile, had also met Kerouac, having been encouraged to go and visit him by Lucien. Kerouac had not taken a lot of notice of Allen at first because he was so much younger and jejeune, but remembered their meeting in Vanity of Duluoz, “spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out, seventeen years old, burning black eyes, a strangely deep voice.” Jack was waiting for a midafternoon breakfast of bacon and eggs and offered Allen a beer. Allen, nervous and seeking to imitate Burroughs, replied, “No, no. Discretion is the better part of valor.”25 Kerouac’s narrative continues, “ ‘Aw where’s my food’ I yelled at Edie, because that’s precisely all I had on my mind at the moment he walked in. Turns out it took years for Irwin to get over a certain fear of the ‘brooding football artist yelling for his supper in big daddy chair’ or some such.”26 They soon became good friends, finding they had much in common despite their four-year age difference.
And so the core of the original Beat Generation was now complete: Jack Kerouac was spending about half his time at Edie’s apartment and the rest with his parents in Ozone Park. Whenever he was in the city they would meet up with Lucien and Celine, or everyone would congregate in the big living room at 421 West 118th Street and listen to records on Edie’s large aluminum Victrola. Allen Ginsberg was in the middle of long soulful talks with both Lucien and Jack about art and literature, and Kammerer was, as ever, fawning around Lucien. Joan spent much of her pregnancy with her parents and then, after Julie was born in June, remained with them upstate to spend the summer months with Julie away from the city heat. That summer, the group could be found most nights in a booth at the West End, the huge jukebox playing “You Always Hurt the One You Love” by the Mills Brothers,27 that season’s big hit, with Lucien sporting a red bandana, very much their leader, drinking Pernod, imagining themselves in fin de siècle Paris. Burroughs had now met them all except Joan, but he was not yet a part of the group; they were a good ten years younger than him, and he was still living in Greenwich Village and unlikely to make a hundred-block subway ride except by arrangement.
Bill had been taking jujitsu lessons up in Yorkville at 86th Street, learning how to defend himself, learning how to fall. The gym was run by someone known as Henry who also worked for the Shorten Detective Agency. He told Bill, “You go round there. He’s shorthanded and he’ll probably give you a job.” Bill signed up and spent July and August 1944 serving processes and making sure that the beneficiaries named in a will were who they claimed to be. He only stayed for two months.
Although this young, middle-class group of students and graduates were not deprived in any way by the war, apart from the rationing of food and gasoline, they were not unaffected by it: in January 1944, Kerouac’s best friend, Sebastian Sampas, had died after being wounded in the Allied landing at Anzio in Italy, and they all knew people in the armed forces. They recognized the futility and waste of war, but most of all they felt that once it was all over, there must be a better way to live, a new set of values to live by. They were vague discussions, unfocused, but they called these new values A New Vision, named after W. B. Yeats’s mystical text, A Vision,28 but also taking in undigested mouthfuls of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Dostoyevsky. Lucien Carr was the leader in these discussions, with Ginsberg his “closest student friend,”29 as Kerouac called him. Kerouac himself played a very active part. Years later Lucien recalled:
I suppos
e in those years at Columbia we really did have something going. It was a rebellious group I suppose, of which there are many on campuses, but it was one that really was dedicated to a new vision. It’s practically impossible to define. Maybe it’s just a term we sold ourselves. But it was trying to look at the world in a new light, trying to look at the world in a way that gave it some meaning. Trying, I suppose, to find values that were different and not accepted values but at the same time that were valid. And it was through literature that all this was supposed to be done. And it was through Jack and Allen principally that it was gonna be done.30
Chapter Ten
Death of a friend. To describe how mixed with one’s grief comes the thought that the witness of some foolish word or act of one’s own is gone.
—W. B. YEATS1
1. The Gathering Storm
The situation with David Kammerer was becoming critical. Lucien had moved from the Union Theological Seminary to the Warren Hall Residence Club, a small hotel on West 115th Street at Amsterdam Avenue next to the campus. One night Kammerer climbed the fire escape and slipped in through Lucien’s third-floor window left open in the hot summer night. He told Bill that he stood silently watching Lucien for half an hour as he slept in the moonlight. But as he climbed back over the fence, the hotel guard held him at gunpoint and the police were called. Lucien was summoned to the lobby and had to testify that Kammerer had been drinking all night in his room. Burroughs laughed—“S’pose you’d’a found the wrong room and hovered over a perfect stranger?”—but it was becoming obvious that Kammerer was allowing his obsession to get out of control.
One time Burroughs and Kammerer stopped by Edie’s apartment, where Kammerer hoped to find Lucien, who lived there most of the time with Celine. No one was at home, and to express his disappointment, Kammerer tried to hang Kitkat, a little kitten that Jack and Edie had recently bought, using Burroughs’s necktie. Bill fortunately put a stop to it, but Jack was furious when he heard about it. Burroughs’s passivity in the face of all this clearly aberrant behavior is extraordinary, as if he were completely withdrawn from life. In later years he adored cats and would never have permitted a kitten to be hurt.
In her memoirs Edie Parker said, “I always felt that David was creepy and might as well have had cloven hooves and horns growing out of thick, curly red hair. He was the dark cloud that hovered over our lives. […] He drove us all to silence because all he ever wanted to talk about was Lucien. […] Needless to say, he was uncomfortable to be around so we avoided him, in fact Burroughs was the only person who could tolerate him.”2 But Kammerer was Bill’s best friend, and though Bill liked Jack and Lucien and Allen, they were a decade younger than he and David, and so they had less in common.
Edie describes a small but telling incident at the Minetta Tavern, when Kammerer and Burroughs joined Edie, Jack, Lucien, and Celine at a table. When Kerouac went to visit the toilet, Kammerer immediately left his seat and took the space Jack had vacated between Edie and Lucien. Edie and Lucien both spoke at once—“That’s Jack’s seat”—then Lucien told him, “Beat it!” and Kammerer stood up and returned to his original seat, completely unfazed. “My God, he was a pest,” wrote Edie.3
Kammerer’s behavior was beginning to scare Lucien; he seemed so obsessive, always hovering on the fringe of the group, staring intently at him. Lucien and Jack decided to ship out together. Jack had been working as a script reader for Columbia Pictures, but that job had come to an end. The best money was in going back to sea with all its attendant risks. Lucien had seaman’s papers from a summer vacation job on New York Harbor transporting aircraft fuel, so they decided they would find a boat heading for France, jump ship, and walk to Paris. Jack would speak French and Lucien would pretend to be a deaf-mute. They would be two poets, there for the liberation of Paris. Best of all, Lucien would escape from Kammerer. They found a ship, SS Robert Hayes, but as they approached, the crew were all leaving, tumbling down the gangplank to petition the union to remove the chief mate, whom they accused of being a fascist and whom they refused to work with. The bosun told Jack and Lucien to go on board, stow their gear, eat, but not to sign on. Jack and Lucien told the chief mate that they would not sign on until they had made a trial run to Albany, so he threw them off the ship. Every effort of Lucien’s to get away from Kammerer seemed to be thwarted. Events seemed to be moving, inexorably, to a climax.
2. A Death in the Family
The night of Sunday, August 13, 1944, was hot and humid, making it almost impossible to sleep. People dragged mattresses out onto fire escapes and sat around on stoops, talking and drinking. By the early hours Kammerer had located Lucien at the West End, where he had gone after dropping off Celine. Lucien was already very drunk. When the West End closed at 3:00 a.m., they took a bottle and walked over on 116th Street to Riverside Park, crossed the Henry Hudson Parkway,4 which separates the whole of upper Manhattan from its narrow strip of riverside, and settled themselves on the bank of the Hudson looking across to the Palisades in New Jersey. Lucien told Ginsberg that Kammerer insisted that he let him give him a blow job, and in the ensuing struggle Lucien pulled out a scout knife with a two-inch blade and stabbed him. This was basically the story used in court, but Lucien also claimed that Kammerer had threatened to injure Celine if he did not let David blow him. Lucien later told Burroughs that he had been so angry he told Kammerer, “I could kill you!” and Kammerer replied, “Well, why don’t you, then?” And Lucien did.
According to Kerouac’s novel, Lucien stabbed him twelve times in the heart, then he tore Kammerer’s white shirt into strips and tied rocks up with the strips, which he attached to Kammerer’s arms and legs. He pushed rocks down his trouser legs and fastened his arms with his belt, but it was all a hasty, inept, panicky job and most of the rocks fell out. Lucien pushed him in but he wouldn’t sink. Lucien stripped off all his clothes and waded neck deep into the river and pulled him in. The body floated off downstream, facedown. Lucien mopped himself down as best he could, put on his dry clothes, and made his way back to Riverside Drive, where he found a cab.
Burroughs was woken at dawn on Monday by an urgent tapping on his door at 69 Bedford Street. He pulled on his bathrobe and went to answer it. Lucien was agitated and incoherent. He handed Bill a bloodstained pack of Lucky Strikes and said, “Have the last cigarette.” Bill knew at once what must have happened. “So this is how Dave Kammerer ends,” he thought out loud.5 He crumpled up the pack and cigarettes and flushed them down the toilet.
Lucien gave him a garbled, still drunken account of events. Bill told him, “Well, you’d better turn yourself in. You could plead some sort of self-defense.” Lucien kept repeating, “I’ll get the hot seat,” but Bill paced the room. “Don’t be absurd. Turn yourself in. Get a good lawyer. Do what he tells you to do. Say what he tells you to say. You’ll make a case for self-defense. It’s pretty absurd, but juries have swallowed bigger ones than that!”6 Bill didn’t fully believe him, but Lucien was in such a state of anxiety that no coherent explanation of what happened was possible, and when Lucien left, Bill still didn’t know whether it was true or not. Bill gave him five dollars to get home. Bill dressed, then walked over to Morton Street to see if Dave had come back, but his room was empty. Bill went upstairs to tell Louise McMann what Lucien had said had happened. She gasped, “My God, how horrible!” and asked, “Do you think it’s true?” Bill said he was beginning to think that it was.
At dawn Lucien shook Jack awake. “I got rid of the old man last night,” he told him.
“Why’d you go and do that?”7 asked Jack, then dragged himself out of bed and woke himself up with a shower, leaving Edie to sleep. Lucien still had Kammerer’s eyeglasses and the murder weapon. He asked Jack to accompany him while he disposed of them. In fact, as he already intended to turn himself in, there was no reason to dispose of the evidence, but no one was thinking clearly. In Morningside Park, Jack pretended to take a piss while Lucien buried the glasses, and in Harlem, at 125th Street, Luci
en rather ostentatiously dropped the knife through a deep subway grate. Next they took a cab to Park Avenue, where Lucien borrowed another five dollars from his psychiatrist, who “washed his hands” of him. On Third Avenue they saw Korda’s The Four Feathers before continuing on to the Museum of Modern Art. Lucien dawdled before a portrait by Modigliani and spent time studying Tchelitchew’s Cache Cache. All the time Lucien was screwing up the courage to go to his mother, confess what happened, get a lawyer, and turn himself in. They passed through Times Square and even visited the Maritime Union Hall where, had things gone differently, they would have taken a ship to Europe. They headed back uptown and eventually, after a few drinks, Lucien said goodbye to Jack and turned off Third Avenue onto 57th Street where his mother lived. That afternoon Lucien, accompanied by his lawyer, Vincent J. Malone, presented himself at the office of District Attorney Frank S. Horan and told his story to Jacob Grumet, the assistant DA in charge of the Manhattan Homicide Bureau.
There was no body, and no one had reported Kammerer missing, so at first the police didn’t believe him, but after Lucien showed them where he had buried the glasses both the Detective Bureau and the Homicide Squad assigned men to the case. Lucien was kept in custody at Horan’s office and spent most of the night reading Rimbaud and Yeats’s A Vision. At 2:30 p.m. on the fifteenth, the Coast Guard reported a body floating off 108th Street. By the time the Marine Police and Coast Guard had towed it in, Lucien, Vincent Malone, and the police were all waiting on the shore. A shaky Lucien identified the bloated corpse and was taken straightaway to the Elizabeth Street Police Station and booked on a homicide charge. The next morning the New York World-Telegram headline read, “Student Admits Killing Teacher.”8