Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Burroughs was happy to lend them books—Lucien had Bill’s copy of Yeats’s A Vision with him in jail—and gave Jack and Allen books as gifts. Jack received Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, from which he got his notion of the fellaheen. “Edify your mind, my boy,” said Burroughs.9 Allen was given an old red clothbound Liveright edition of Hart Crane’s Collected Poems; Crane’s “The Bridge” became one of the influences on “Howl.” In addition they borrowed books by Cocteau, Blake, Kafka, Joyce, and Céline.

  At that time Burroughs was very keen on the work of Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist and sociologist, and often carried with him his Mind and Society,10 as well as New Science, Giambattista Vico’s circular theory of history. Lucien Carr remembered, “Bill used to say, ‘Literacy is the curse of mankind. If, however, you are cursed with literacy, all you should read is Korzybski, Pareto, and Spengler.’ And of course everyone rushed out to find out who these wonderful people were and no one could put up with Korzybski and Pareto, but Spengler we managed to fight through.”11 Korzybski, Pareto, and Spengler are virtually impenetrable to the modern reader and posterity has returned them to obscurity, but they are interesting in that they are early examples of Burroughs’s fascination with alternative social and medical systems.

  Throughout his life Burroughs tried dozens of forms of self-improvement, from Scientology to est, ESP, psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box, and Reich’s vegetotherapy. He practiced the Alexander posture method, studied general semantics, Robert Monroe’s out-of-body seminar, Konstantin Raudive’s paranormal tape experiments, Major Bruce MacManaway’s Pillar of Light, the Psionic Wishing Machine, and Carlos Castaneda’s fictional Don Juan. He believed in UFOs and Whitley Strieber’s alien abductions and used the “Control” computer in London that answered questions for twelve shillings and sixpence a time. He felt that they all had something of value, but that none of them came near to really helping him.

  Ginsberg and Kerouac came away with the image of Burroughs as Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy.” They found him to be courteous and dignified, a perfect gentleman, but very shy and sensitive. “Delicacy and melancholy, fragility and vulnerability, sweet and sad like a little boy,”12 was how Ginsberg remembered him. Burroughs quickly replaced Lucien Carr as the “leader” or mentor of the Columbia group. They discussed art and literature, and he soon introduced them to his other interests: psychotherapy, weapons, lowlife and nostalgie de la boue. Burroughs was usually the one with money and he was always happy to pay for meals and taxis. In those days traces of Bill as jeunesse dorée still came through, and he could be obstreperous when drunk and exhibit the bad behavior of a privileged Harvard schoolboy. Kerouac wrote, “the way he’d spit his bones out & snarl over chicken in elegant French restaurants, wrenching pollitos apart with his great healthy Anglosaxon teeth—‘Bill, we’re in a polite French restaurant!’—‘Full of la belle gashes, hey? Whup?’ ”13 Bad behavior in restaurants—picking food up in his hands and generally offending the other patrons—continued until he became friends with Brion Gysin in the late fifties, who soon put a stop to it, regarding it as the height of bad manners.

  Burroughs always credited Kerouac with encouraging him to become a writer, and it was Kerouac who first created the public perception of Burroughs as Old Bull Lee. The humor, the intelligence, the idea of William as sage, as guru, all first came from Kerouac’s books. Kerouac was already a dedicated writer. He told Bill, when they first met, that he had already written over a million words and showed some of his writing to Bill, who thought it was terrible and said so. Bill Gilmore agreed with him. “I must say I didn’t think he showed any talent at all,” Burroughs said. “I don’t think he could ever have published that early stuff. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t just my opinion because when I saw On the Road I could see he really had something.” Burroughs said later, “He didn’t have much of a mind. I don’t think he had a mind at all. Like so many writers, a writer that thinks is a great rarity. He had talent and he had a voice. He never had any doubt at all about what he was going to do.”14

  Jack had been working on a text based on the Kammerer killing called I Wish I Were You. He showed a short version to Burroughs and they came up with the idea of collaborating on a book, which was to be written as a hard-boiled detective story with Bill and Jack writing alternate chapters, Bill as “Will Dennison” and Jack as “Mike Ryko.” The book was credited to William Lee and John Kerouac. They began writing it that December, initially at Riverside Drive, then when the flat’s occupant returned to the city, the majority of it at Bill’s new apartment above Riordan’s Café at Columbus Circle. They called the book And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, after a radio report of a circus fire they heard while writing the book.

  Bill attempted the hard-boiled style with some success: “At this point the buzzer rang. It’s a loud buzzer that goes right through you.” There was a clear separation of material and who wrote what. They would meet and read their latest section to each other. Bill would normally only grunt a noncommittal “It’s alright” or “Good,” whereas Jack wanted a more enthusiastic response. Jack’s friends were astonished that Bill had managed to get Jack to do so much work; he was famous for walking off the job. Duncan Purcell—“Uncle Dunc”—wrote to Edie to say, “I suppose [Burroughs] should be commended for keeping Kerouac at work for a longer period than ever before in history.” Their perceptions, however, were based on work other than writing. In fact, it was Kerouac who deserved the praise, because he broke Bill’s aversion to writing. “He encouraged me to write when I was not really interested in it. But stylistically, or so far as influence goes, I don’t feel close to him at all.”15 By March 1945 the book was finished and Kerouac took it to his agents, Ingersoll & Brennan, who sent it to Simon & Schuster for consideration. They were both hoping for commercial success, with Kerouac describing it to his sister as a “portrait of the ‘lost’ segment of our generation, hard-boiled, honest, and sensationally real”16—almost a definition of the Beat Generation. Alas, publishers were not overwhelmed. In August Kerouac, who was a fast, accurate typist, retyped it, possibly with a few changes. Burroughs said, “It wasn’t sensational enough to make it from that point of view, nor was it well written or interesting enough to make it on a purely literary point of view; it fell in between.”17 Nonetheless, Bill had “fun” doing it and it helped establish writing as his creative outlet. When Lucien heard what they were doing he objected vociferously, which dampened their later attempts to sell it. Years later, in discussion with Carr, James Grauerholz on behalf of the Burroughs estate agreed not to permit publication until after Carr’s death. The Kammerer killing was one of several incidents to inspire James Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, and in 2013 Kill Your Darlings, a film by John Krokidas, was made of the incident.

  Bill’s apartment was above Riordan’s Café at 42 West 60th Street at Eighth Avenue, just to the west of Broadway at Columbus Circle, a run-down neighborhood on the edge of Hell’s Kitchen. The apartment opened onto an air shaft and never received sunlight; it was dirty and filled with cockroaches, although Bill soon disposed of them, and he sometimes killed a bedbug. The wallpaper was peeling away because the radiator leaked steam “when there was any steam in it to leak.”18 Bill sealed the dirty windows tight with a caulking of newspapers against the penetrating cold. He had moved there specifically to study the denizens of Eighth Avenue: the gamblers and honky-tonk types who hung around nearby Madison Square Garden; the old men’s bars; the hustlers’ bars; the junkies and tea-heads, narcotics agents and agent-provocateur bars between 44th and 42nd Streets; and Times Square itself.

  Tens of thousands of servicemen passed through Times Square nightly; many were lonely country boys, in New York for the first time, all looking for booze and broads, wandering bewildered down dimmed-out Broadway until they caught the excitement of the Square, which was like a permanent celebration, a daily New Year’s Eve, watched over by the giant Camel sign
at 44th and Broadway, which now featured an airman blowing smoke rings (actually steam). There were giant movie palaces and dancehalls, Loew’s State, Radio City Music Hall featuring the Rockettes dance troupe, the Palace, the Capitol, and the four-thousand-seater Paramount featuring the Benny Goodman Orchestra with its vocalist Frank Sinatra. Times Square had another, less salubrious population who preyed upon the servicemen and tourists. It was haven for the hustlers and thieves, pickpockets and amphetamine-heads, the pimps and junkies who hung out for hours talking over cold cups of coffee or dunking pound cake at Bickford’s twenty-four-hour cafeteria on 42nd Street and the twenty-four-hour Horn & Hardart Automat. There was a twenty-four-hour pinball palace there called the Pocarino where nighthawks, high on amphetamine, played pinball with speed-freak intensity illuminated by undersea, greenish-blue fluorescent light. The cinema marquees lit up the whole area, though they were dim in comparison to prewar levels, making it into a huge frenzied stage set.

  3. Junk

  Burroughs’s interest in lowlife began with Jack Black’s You Can’t Win and grew with his introduction to petty criminals in Chicago. He always took on the protective coloring of his friends, and in New York he had mostly socialized with Kammerer and his bohemian circle in Greenwich Village. Now that Dave was gone, Burroughs returned to his original interests. While drinking at the West End, Jack Kerouac had met Bob Brandinburg, who had moved to New York from Cleveland. He claimed to have connections in the underworld, and Kerouac introduced him to Bill. Brandinburg worked as a soda jerk at the Hamburger Mary cafeteria near Columbia, and Bill liked to stop by there in the afternoon and listen to his stories of heists and stickups. Brandinburg looked like someone from a Humphrey Bogart movie with his padded shoulders, felt hat, and flashy tie,19 and he became something of a role model for Burroughs, who took to imitating his purposeful way of walking, shoulder up as he turned a corner or sliding sideways through a doorway. Bill admired his single-minded approach to life: how he would enter a bar for a drink, have his drink, and leave with no wasted time. Bill was still in touch with Jack Anderson, and a friend of his, Hoagy Norton, had managed to steal a quantity of morphine syrettes and a tommy gun from the navy dockyard. He broke the gun into parts and took one piece a day until he had the whole thing. He never left the yard without something. Bill contacted Brandinburg to sell the stolen goods. Brandinburg said he knew someone who would want them and invited him to stop by his apartment.

  Brandinburg lived with his girlfriend, Vickie, on Henry Street on the Lower East Side, under the giant steel span of the Manhattan Bridge. Their roommates were Herbert Huncke, Phil “the Sailor” White, and Bozo. Henry Street was a canyon wall of tall crumbling “old law” tenements, with tiny rooms and little light, built to house immigrants, iron fire escapes crawling over their fronts like vines. Bill stamped the snow off his feet, climbed the worn black metal stairs, and knocked at a narrow metal-fronted door. It was opened by Bozo, an overweight, flabby middle-aged queen, with tattooing on his forearms and backs of his hands.20 Bozo was the original owner of the apartment before the others moved in. He was a failed vaudeville performer who now worked as an attendant at a Turkish bath.

  “Good evening,” said Bill politely, and handed him his gray snap-brimmed fedora, his gloves, and his fifteen-year-old Chesterfield overcoat with the velvet collar. Confronted by a man of obvious wealth and taste, Bozo immediately began apologizing about the state of the apartment. It was a railroad flat, with the front door opening straight onto the kitchen. Brandinburg came to greet him and introduce him to the other occupant of the room, Herbert Huncke. They sat Bill down at the kitchen table. Huncke took one look at Bill and was convinced that he was a federal narcotics agent. “Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from his large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast. The effect was almost like a physical impact,” Burroughs wrote.21 Huncke was small and thin, his shirt collar too large for his neck. His skin had a spotted, translucent quality like vellum, as if a suntan were fading into a mottled yellow color. Pancake makeup had been heavily applied to cover a skin eruption. Burroughs wrote that his mouth was drawn down at the corners “in a grimace of petulant annoyance.”22 Huncke passed up the opportunity to buy the morphine and Brandinburg took Bill through a red corduroy curtain into the next room where there was a votive candle burning in front of a china Buddha.

  Phil White, known as “the Sailor” because he was in the merchant marine, was lying on a studio couch but swung his legs off to say hello and smiled, showing discolored brownish teeth. Burroughs described him in Junky: “The skin of his face was smooth and brown. The cheek-bones were high and he looked Oriental. His ears stuck out at right angles from his asymmetrical skull. The eyes were brown and they had a peculiar brilliance, as though points of light were shining behind them. The light in the room glinted on the points of light in his eyes like an opal.”23

  Bill explained that he was trying to dispose of seventy-five half-grain morphine syrettes. Unlike Huncke, Phil White trusted Brandinburg’s judgment that Bill was all right. Bozo appeared with a quart of Schenley’s bourbon and Phil got down to business and explained that the normal price for morphine was two dollars a grain but people wanted tablets; the syrettes had too much water in them and people had to squeeze the stuff out and cook it down unless they wanted to inject it. He offered Bill $1.50 a grain. Bill said that was all right. In the next room Bill could hear raised voices as Brandinburg assured Huncke that Bill was not a narc. The apartment was not only littered with drug paraphernalia but also contained an arsenal of weapons as well as stolen goods. Bill gave Phil his telephone number.

  A few nights later, Bill used one of the syrettes.24 It was his first experience of junk. Syrettes are like toothpaste tubes, only with a needle on the end. A pin has to be pushed down the needle to pierce the seal and ready the syrette for use. Huncke later described how Burroughs had his own, fastidious way of shooting up, which consisted of rolling his shirtsleeve as high as he could get it up his arm. Then he would take a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a cotton swab, dab the cotton into the alcohol, and clean off a likely spot on his arm. “He’d look at the point on the end of the dropper to make sure that the point was good and sharp. And he’d sort of feel around his arm until he’d located the spot he thought he wanted to use. And then he’d inject the needle and squirt it in.”25

  Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous.26

  Phil White came over a few days after their first meeting and bought five boxes of syrettes for four dollars a box. He shot up one of them in his leg before he left. The next day he came back for ten boxes. Bill laid them out and put two to one side, saying, “These are for me.”

  Phil was surprised and told him that using junk was “the worst thing that can happen to a man. We all think we can control it at first. Sometimes we don’t want to control it.” The next day he showed up and asked if Bill had changed his mind about selling the two remaining boxes. Bill said no but sold him two syrettes to use right then. Bill shot the eight remaining syrettes over the next month, then, after six weeks, he telephoned Phil to see if he had any to sell. The price had gone up to three dollars a grain. Bill bought twelve half-grain tablets in a thin glass tube and Phil apologized for the retail rate. He introduced Bill to a drugstore that sold needles without a prescription and showed him how to make a collar out of paper to fit the needle into an eyedropper: easier to use than a hypodermic syringe. He took him to a writing doctor on 102nd Street and Broadway—“making the croaker”—with a story about kidney stones. The doctor’s wife slammed the door in Bill’s face, but Phil managed to talk his wa
y past her and get a script for twelve grains. Every few weeks Phil would ship out for two- or three-week trips. Bill was using junk, but not enough to have a habit. He was fascinated by the criminal circles he was now moving in and took to spending time at the Angler Bar where Herbert Huncke liked to hang out.

  The Angler Bar, on the eastern side of Eighth Avenue at 43rd Street, wrapped itself around a jeweler on the corner, with another entrance on 43rd Street, hence its name. It was around the corner from Times Square and was, according to Ginsberg, who accompanied Bill on many of his anthropological expeditions, the hottest social-melting-pot venue in the area, filled with 42nd Street male hustlers, car thieves, second-story men, burglars attempting to offload hot goods, dealers in grass and heroin, junkies looking to score, black chauffeurs killing time, and undercover cops keeping tabs on everyone.27

  Bill had bribed Huncke with spare change, drinks, and meals, and his animosity toward Bill had quickly evaporated. Kerouac described him as “a small, dark, Arabic-looking man with an oval face and huge blue eyes that were lidded wearily always, with the huge lids of a mask. […] He had the look of a man who is sincerely miserable in the world.”28 Huncke sat at the window, his half-closed eyes fixed on the street, like an alligator flopped on a mud bank waiting for prey, tracking every movement. He looked for johns to fuck, looked for marks to steal from, pockets to pick, drunks to roll, waited for dealers, waited for fences, watched for suckers, anticipating the movements of the cops. The Times Square cops despised Huncke because he lacked even the questionable morality of a thief: he would steal from anyone, friend or stranger, no matter how sick or hungry or down-and-out they were. The cops nicknamed him “the Creep,” and sometimes, when his behavior was particularly despicable, they would ban him from the Square.