Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Burroughs described him: “Huncke’s very prickly. I got along with him over a period of time. I saw a lot of him but he was always mooching off of somebody else, he hated to live in his own place. I didn’t dislike Huncke, we had difficulties at times. He was an argumentative, nagging sort of person, always was, always starting arguments and complaining all the time about this and that. Very much a whiner. He’s a great storyteller when he gets on a pure anecdotal, picaresque thing, about how he’s always getting the worst of it, but when he got on his self-pity kick he was terrible. It was a question of keeping him off that, then he was quite amusing.”29

  At this time, Burroughs’s interests were mostly in his criminal cohorts. Of the West End crowd, he was closest to Kerouac, whom he saw all the time because they were working on the book together. When Kerouac was in Manhattan they would bar hop together. He saw something of Ginsberg but they were not as close. Kerouac had traveled, he was a seaman, he was married, whereas Allen was only nineteen, and had been no farther than New Jersey. But Allen was anxious to learn, and that Christmas he spent as much time as he could with them, when he was not studying at Columbia. He described the Times Square scene: “Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac and myself from about ’44 to ’46, probably the most formative period of early, Spenglerian mind, where that language of, Zap, Hip, Square, Beat, was provided over the Bickford cafeteria tables by Huncke. I would say Herbert Huncke is the basic originator of the ethos of Beat and the conceptions of Beat and Square.”30 Ginsberg said, “I was hanging around and tried out some of those syrettes at the same time. I took a lot of junk over the years thereafter but always irregularly and mechanically. Needle in vein and all. I made sure I didn’t take it twice in the same week, never on the same day, and always with ten days in between, or nine days or a month. Just irregularly. But I’m not a habit type—I’m a workaholic. So I started taking junk the same time as Burroughs and I observed him building a habit.”31

  Bill was, in a sense, living two lives, and purposely separated them by renting a small apartment a few doors from Phil, Bozo, and Bob’s apartment on Henry Street, where he could take drugs and hang out with underworld types whom he didn’t particularly want to mix with his West End Bar friends. The rent was only ten dollars a month. Bill installed an old Victrola and a few basic amenities but it was never intended as a permanent address.

  One night Bill and Jack went to Phil White’s Henry Street apartment to see if he had any morphine. The door was answered by a slim, six-foot-tall redhead, who was the only one at home. Vickie Russell, whose real name was Priscilla Arminger, was the daughter of a Detroit judge and, like Edie, was from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She was Bob Brandinburg’s girlfriend, having got off the bus at the Port Authority terminal and walked straight into the arms of a pimp named Knuckles. He held her prisoner then broke her in with a couple of 42nd Street whores. She soon got away from him and set up on her own. She wore a knuckle-duster under her glove and bought a switchblade.

  She took them through to the sitting room. It had been transformed into something resembling the illicit gambling room in back of a Chinese restaurant. The walls were painted black, with black drapes over the windows. A large Chinese character was painted in red lacquer on one wall. There was a black, L-shaped couch, several red-and-black lacquered tables, and a red light bulb. On the ceiling Brandinburg had painted a large color wheel: a mosaic of triangles and squares in crude primary colors. “We get some frantic kicks out of that wheel when we’re high,” she told them. “We lay on our backs and dig the wheel and pretty soon it begins to spin. The longer you watch it, the faster it spins.”32

  She suggested that they go to Times Square and score. Bill paid the cab fare, but after she tried several likely places she concluded it was too late and suggested they buy some Benzedrine inhalers and get high on them. The Smith, Kline & French Benzedrine brand inhaler, in the new plastic tube introduced in 1943, cost twenty-five cents and contained 250 milligrams of racemic amphetamine, 75 milligrams of oil of lavender, and 25 milligrams of menthol. They were perfectly legal and advertised in the press. Bill and Vickie bought a number of inhalers and went to an all-night coffee shop near 52nd and Sixth Avenue where musicians hung out after their gigs. Vickie showed them what to do. Inside the inhaler there were six white strips of blotting paper impregnated with amphetamine. They were awful to taste, but the effect of just one of those strips came on quickly and lasted for eight hours. Vickie expertly extracted the strips and gave three to Bill, telling him to roll them into a pill and wash it down with coffee. In Junky Burroughs uses this event as the subject for one of his hilarious set pieces:

  [Vickie] selected some gone numbers and beat on the table with the expression of a masturbating idiot. I began talking very fast. My mouth was dry and my spit came out in round white balls—spitting cotton, it’s called. […] I was full of expansive, benevolent feelings, and suddenly wanted to call on people I hadn’t seen in months or even years, people I did not like and who did not like me.33

  They got so high that Kerouac became completely disoriented on the subway back downtown and didn’t know where he was. However, he recovered enough to spend twenty-four hours in bed with Vickie at Bill’s seedy apartment.

  Chapter Twelve

  She was in all probability one of the most charming and intelligent women I’ve ever met.

  —HERBERT HUNCKE

  1. Joan

  Joan Vollmer returned to New York with her daughter, Julie, early in September 1944 looking rested and having lost fifteen pounds. Within three weeks she found a place to live: apartment 35 at 419 West 115th Street between Morningside Drive and Amsterdam Avenue, a huge, old-fashioned apartment with six big rooms and a sun-filled living room. She signed the lease for $150 a month under her married name of Mrs. Paul Adams and gave as her cosignees Mr. and Mrs. Jack Kerouac. Edie had given up the old apartment when she went to Grosse Pointe after marrying Kerouac but had followed her errant husband back to New York and was living with him in his cramped room at Warren Hall. She arranged to share the place with Joan but then broke up with Jack again and returned to Grosse Pointe, so Joan needed to find more flatmates to share the rent. Her old friend Ruth Clark spent a few months there but became pregnant and soon went to join her marine husband where he was stationed. An advertisement in the Columbia Spectator student paper found Hal Chase, who took the first room by the door. Haldon Chase was from Denver and was studying anthropology at Columbia, specializing in American Indian culture. He had been in the ski troops but was already discharged and was on a somewhat different wavelength from Joan, Edie, and Jack, but he fitted in well enough. Ginsberg described him as a “brash innocent mountaineering Denver boy, ‘Child of the Rainbow’ with pretty golden blond hair and good physique, an all-Indian hawk nose and American boy State Fair fresh manners.” His role in the Beat Generation saga was to introduce them all to his hometown friend Neal Cassady, but in the meantime he began seeing Celine Young.

  On arrival in New York Joan began an affair with Bruce Mazlish, later the celebrated psychohistorian. Through Mazlish she met John Kingsland, a nineteen-year-old Columbia student who was in Ginsberg’s year and had originally been on the same floor of the Union Theological Seminary as Allen and Lucien. He was thrown out of the seminary in January 1945 for being drunk and having once taken Joan to his room. He and Joan got together and he moved into 115th Street. Despite their age difference, Kingsland assumed it was a serious, long-term relationship and that this disparity would diminish in time. He arranged to have his classes in the afternoon so he could watch over Julie in the mornings while Joan worked in a nursery school. Then he would go to class and work evenings at the library. Joan often wrote his class papers for him, and there was one term paper on Dryden and eighteenth-century English literature that she wrote in the style of Dryden that his professor, Joseph Wood Krutch, admired so much that Kingsland was concerned he would be found out. Joan was very well read: her bookshelves were
filled with the works of Goethe, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Karl Marx, and she was clearly a good writer.

  Allen Ginsberg, meanwhile, had been having a difficult time. Johnny the bartender—presumably a paid informant—had reported to Dean McKnight’s office at Columbia that Allen had been drinking with Kerouac at the West End Bar and the dean summoned Allen’s father; Louis left the dean’s office in tears. Allen studied hard and had straight-A grades, but Columbia wanted complete control over their scholarship students and the West End was out of bounds. Allen had to leave Warren Hall and move to Livingston Hall, on campus, where he shared with Bill Lancaster, whose father was a banker and a director of the Foreign Policy Association.

  On March 16, in the course of one of their long discussions, Burroughs told Jack bluntly that he would never free himself from his mother’s pernicious influence unless he made a proper break with her instead of running home every time he had a problem. Bill said, “The trouble with you is you’re just tied to your mother’s apron strings and you are going in a wide circle around her now, but it’s going to get a narrower and narrower circle and sooner or later you are going to be right in there, unable to move away from your mother. That’s your fate, that’s your Faustian destiny.”1

  Appalled by Burroughs’s prophecy, Jack went straight to Livingston Hall to discuss it with Allen. Ever since Edie had returned to her mother in December, Jack had been spending at least half of his time in Ozone Park, Queens, where his father was dying. Jack had not connected his separation from Edie, and his inability to commit himself to their relationship, with his mother’s strenuous efforts to be the only woman in his life. Jack recognized that Burroughs was right: he had internalized many of his mother’s ideas and was too closely tied to her. It got so late that Jack stayed over with Allen. Jack was aware of Allen’s erotic feelings for him, but they slept chastely in their underwear.

  Allen suspected that the Irish woman who cleaned his room harbored anti-Semitic feelings, and had used this to draw her attention to the dirty window that she never cleaned. He had written “Butler has no balls” (a reference to Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University), followed by an eye-catching “Fuck the Jews” with a skull and crossbones beneath it. But instead of a clean window, Allen’s graffiti resulted in a report to Dean Furman. At 8:00 a.m., after Bill Lancaster had already gone to class, Furman, the assistant dean of student-faculty relationships, burst into Allen’s room. Jack leapt from the bed and ran to Lancaster’s empty bed in the next room, pulling the covers up over his face. Allen was made to wipe the offending words from the window, but he knew that Furman was thinking the worst. Allen later found two notes in his box. One charged him $2.35 for entertaining an unauthorized guest overnight, and the other, from Dean McKnight, informed him that he was suspended and suggested that he spend the weekend with his father, “since the privilege of residence at Livingston has been withdrawn from you.” McKnight wrote to Allen’s father saying that he had been suspended for obscene writings on his window and giving overnight housing to a person who was not a member of the college and whose presence on the campus was unwelcome. Kerouac had been branded as “an unwholesome influence on the students” ever since he was charged as a material witness in the Kammerer case.

  On Monday morning, Dean McKnight glared at Allen across the desk and said, “Mr. Ginsberg. I hope you understand the enormity of what you have done!”

  Allen remembered the lines in Céline on dealing with madmen and knew that the only way out was to humor him. “Oh I do, sir! I do! I do!” he said. “If you can only tell me what I can do to make up for this…” McKnight decreed that Allen could not return to Columbia until he had worked at a job for a year and had a psychiatric report to confirm that he was now mature enough to be a responsible member of the academic community. Allen was out and the purity of Columbia was assured. With nowhere to live, Allen moved into West 115th Street with Joan, Julie, and Hal Chase.

  Jack and Allen got it into their heads that Burroughs should meet Joan Vollmer because, in Ginsberg’s words, “Joan was a very intelligent woman, somewhat sardonic, curious-minded, learned, and an intellectual lady with a very fine mind and a high noble brow and wittier than any lady I’d ever met. So Kerouac and I thought, ‘Gee, we should introduce her to Burroughs ’cause she’s real smart and Burroughs would appreciate her humor.’ ”2 Joan had been in Albany from the beginning of 1944 and missed the chaos and excitement surrounding the death of Kammerer, and Bill had been away until December, so they had not had much opportunity to meet thus far. Jack and Allen did not know at that time that Bill was gay, so there was a degree of matchmaking going on as well as a genuine feeling that they would get on. They invited him over to 115th Street and he and Joan hit it off. Their humor clicked and they clearly enjoyed each other’s company. Burroughs said, “She was a very extraordinary woman and we got talking, exchanging ideas, she was the smartest person around.” He compared her to Allen, saying that she was in many ways smarter because she didn’t have any limits to her thinking, whereas Allen did. “That was the basis of the attraction, an intellectual, not the usual talks about nothing. She had a sense of humor. It was more humor my style. She had an immediate insight into anyone’s character. Just one look and she knew.”3

  This was a trait that Bill felt she shared with his mother, who could also tell someone’s character with just one glance and knew instantly if someone was lying. Bill said, “Joan was exactly the same. For example, on Kerouac’s character she said, ‘He has a natural inborn fear of authority and if the cops questioned him his mouth would open and out would come the information.’ She had a great deal of insight.”4 Clearly the shared attributes with his mother were part of her appeal. They became good friends and Bill often visited her. His relationship with Joan did not become physical until later. They often ate out together, though this was becoming more difficult in New York as the war effort finally started to have an impact on the general population. In January 1945, Mayor La Guardia had instituted meatless Tuesdays and Fridays; no butchers could sell meat on those days and all restaurant meals had to be meatless. Hot dog stands were exempt. Then in February the federal government introduced a midnight curfew on all restaurants and bars and nightclubs, which hit Manhattan hard as so many people worked in late-night bars and clubs. Only places that were traditionally open twenty-four hours were exempt; night workers had to eat somewhere.

  Jack brought Vickie Russell around to 115th Street and, inspired by Joan’s bathing habits, she began taking a perfumed bubble bath in the kitchen bathtub at Henry Street, her hair piled high on her head like Nefertiti’s crown, the men lunging forward, attempting to blow away the bubbles, avoiding her slaps. For her part, Vickie quickly introduced Benzedrine to the group. Joan had a huge bed with an oriental rug draped across it, and soon Allen, Jack, and Joan, often accompanied by Vickie, were spending evenings high on amphetamine, sprawled over the bed as little Julie slept in the corner of the room.

  On V-E Day, May 8, 1945, Bill and Jack went to join the crowds in Times Square to celebrate; they tried to pick up women but failed. Bill later thought that Jack’s heart wasn’t really in it; Jack thought that Bill scared them off. Later that month, around Memorial Day, people began to drift away for the summer. Joan went with Julie to her parents; Hal Chase went back to Denver; Allen eventually signed up for training at the U.S. Maritime Service in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, an idea that Bill had several times toyed with because that was the fastest route to the coveted Seamen’s Union card. Bill returned to St. Louis to spend the summer with his parents. In July he made a trip to Chicago, “on business,” probably to buy drugs, and was back in New York by the end of August. He had given up the West 60th Street place when he left for the summer and moved into a $4.50-a-night hotel on Park Avenue. Joan was still in need of flatmates, and so around Labor Day, Bill moved into 115th Street.

  Joan and Julie had one room; Hal Chase had another. Allen Ginsberg had his things there, but as he
was away for three and a half months’ training he had stored them all in Hal’s room. Bill took over the spare bedroom and installed his library and few other belongings. By now it was obvious that Joan was very attracted to Bill, but it would be a little while before he reciprocated. He had, however, already told her—and Jack and Allen—that he was homosexual. Edie was back in New York and working for an agency that supplied cigarette girls, selling Chesterfields at “21,” the Kit Kat, Zanzibar, and the Stork Club. Jack was unemployed so he lived off her wages, dividing his time about equally between 115th Street and Ozone Park looking after his father, who was dying of stomach cancer. With Edie away each night until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., Jack was free to run around town seeing other girls. According to Ginsberg, who was prone to exaggerate these things, Kerouac was also seeing men. He was certainly bisexual, and Allen claimed to have had sex with him as many as fifty or sixty times:

  Mostly I blew him. He blew me once. […] Mainly he was interested in getting blown, with men and women! That was probably his main sex life with girls was getting blown too. It became a burden in our sexual relationship because I wanted more response. […] Except I really loved him so I was happy to [go along]. […] It was a very ambivalent relationship with him sort of denying interest but allowing it so it was sort of, a little bit in the pattern of John Rechy… in the sense of Rechy’s feelings of triumph, if he could get somebody to blow him. But refusing to blow anybody. [Kerouac and Burroughs] were in bed a couple of times. […] I think Burroughs would get desperate and say, “Oh, c’mon Jack,” and Jack’d say, “How about blowing me?” and Burroughs’d say, “No, c’mon Jack.” The thing was so funny it wasn’t even homosexuality.5