Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  In September Bill took Jack to a homosexual orgy, but Jack’s Catholic guilt was so great that he canceled a meeting with Bill the next day. He wrote to Allen, who was still training for the merchant marine at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, telling him:

  Since then, I’ve been facing my nature full in the face and the result is a purge. […] Remember that the earlier part of my life has always been spent in an atmosphere vigorously and directly opposed to this sort of atmosphere. It automatically repels me, thereby causing a great deal of remorse, and disgust. […] As to the physical aspects, which as you know, disgust me consciously, I cannot be too sure […] whatever’s in my subconscious is there.6

  Kerouac’s notebooks were filled with drawings of crucifixes and references to God and Jesus; he never left the faith, and his homosexual flings filled him with remorse. However, shortly after the orgy, Jack, Bill, and Allen spent a night at the notorious Everard Baths at 28 West 28th Street where Jack disappeared into the Turkish baths with a group of French sailors who gave him a blow job. Allen commented, “I think he just dug the idea of a bunch of French sailors. He was quite sociable and happy […] he was very gay about it.”7

  As the end of 1945 approached, the little band at Henry Street had dispersed and Huncke had moved into Bill’s Henry Street apartment, which he had kept on because it was so cheap. The idea was that Huncke would pay half the rent and look after the place, but naturally that never happened. Ever since he first met Phil White, Bill had been slowly developing a habit until he was now shooting every day. Phil White and his girlfriend, Kay, moved into an apartment in the same building, and every morning after breakfast they would meet to plan how to get that day’s supply of junk. Bill, now short of money from his habit but still looking respectable, began touring doctors recommended by Phil as being likely to write a script. Burroughs often said that Junky is extremely accurate concerning events around this time, and it spells out in meticulous detail his inexorable slide into addiction. He wrote, “As the habit takes hold, other interests lose importance to the user. Life telescopes down to junk, one fix and looking forward to the next.”8

  2. The Wolfeans and the Non-Wolfeans

  Joan was still married to Paul Adams, but had written saying she no longer wanted to be with him. He clearly still had feelings for her, as Joan revealed in a letter to Edie: “I got two letters from Paul this morning—quite nice ones. First I’d heard from him since I wrote. Didn’t seem too upset, and asked what I wanted to do. Don’t know quite what to answer. He didn’t suggest divorce, but said we might separate and ‘begin courting again.’ Poor little soul. But honestly I think he might be just a little relieved.”9 Their relationship was finally terminated one night in September 1945, when Paul came striding down the hall of 115th Street in his big army boots, fresh home from the front. He was appalled to find six people, all high on Benzedrine, cross-legged and sprawled across the bed, surrounded by overflowing ashtrays, discussing skepticism and decadence. He stared at them in horror and exclaimed, “Is this what I fought for?” Joan just looked up and told him to come down from his “character heights.”10 He filed for divorce shortly afterward.

  It was around this time that one of the set-piece Beat Generation events occurred, later known as “The Night of the Wolfeans and the Non-Wolfeans.” Kerouac was enormously influenced by Thomas Wolfe and talked constantly about his overlong celebrations of American provincial life. In the Benzedrine-fueled discussions at 115th Street this evolved into a split in the household between the Wolfeans and the non-Wolfeans. The Wolfeans were the heterosexual all-American boys, Kerouac and Hal Chase, and on the other side were Burroughs and Ginsberg, characterized by Allen as “the sinister European fairies, me and Burroughs, fairy-Jew-communists non-Wolfean cynics who didn’t believe in the wide-open dewy-eyed lyrical America that they did and who were always trying to make it with the Wolfean boys.”11

  On the night in question, they wound up talking all night, Bill in bed with Kerouac and Allen in bed with Hal Chase, speeding their heads off. Allen got very upset with the way the conversation was going; he felt as if a huge cellophane curtain had come down between them, and protested vehemently, “It’s not fair to be divided like this.” He felt the non-Wolfeans were being discriminated against. “Homosexuality was one of the attributes of non-Wolfeans, and among other things, intellectuality and fear of the body and manipulativeness and Jewishness. International concern rather than appreciation of America and homeyness and family and normal values.”12 That night became a reference point between them for many years. Ginsberg said, “If I had been the only non-Wolfean I would have felt like a jerk, but with Burroughs as one of us, I felt there was some dignity and possibility in the situation despite our deficiency in earthiness.”13 In many ways, the roles and relationships defined by them that night determined how they saw each other for the rest of their lives. These roles were reinforced in games of charades where the Wolfean and non-Wolfean roles were acted out.

  Ginsberg played “The Well-Groomed Hungarian” with an atelier full of worthless paintings. Burroughs would play his shill, wearing one of Joan’s skirts and a wig. Kerouac borrowed his father’s straw hat and played the wide-eyed, innocent American in Paris. Allen would rub his hands together and affect a thick Middle European accent: “Ah, my young man, you vant to buy some culture? I haff these masterpieces that we brought with us when we flee the Nazis.”

  Jack would cross his legs and step from one foot to the other, clutching his hat: “Aw gee, fellers. I cain’t. I got a girl. I have a date with my girl at one of those coffee houses you got out here.”

  At this, Burroughs rather broke role, saying, “You want to stay away from those, Jack. Those ladies got poison juices. Your cock falls off and sometimes they got teeth up there!”14 Bill later remembered his role. “I was playing, er-hum, an Edith Sitwell part. I got in drag and looked like some sinister old lesbian.”15

  This was at the height of Burroughs’s analysis with Dr. Wolberg, and Bill was reading a great deal about hypnoanalysis, narcoanalysis, and Freud. He attempted to put his ideas into practice by analyzing Allen, beginning in August 1945. Ginsberg claimed that he and Kerouac spent a year, an hour a day, five or six days a week free-associating while Burroughs acted as a psychiatrist, sitting in a straight-backed chair while they in turn lay on the couch.16

  Burroughs challenged this, telling Ted Morgan that “perhaps there were ten sessions in all. He unburdened himself to me to no purpose at all. There were various traumatic events, but on the whole nothing of much significance. ‘Nobody loves me, nobody loves me, nobody loves me!’ Now I felt, even at the time, that this was sheer histrionics. It just didn’t ring true and it didn’t mean anything. Now I’d say, ‘Why should anyone love you? And why do you want anyone to love you? That’s the most important question. Why do you want to be loved, why do you need to be loved?’ ”

  Ginsberg, however, felt that the analysis was something of a success. “Mine came to a conclusion when there was some kind of breakthrough of feeling and I finally burst into tears and said, ‘Nobody loves me!’ which I think was what was bothering me at the time. And when I finally came out with it and wept Burroughs sat there, sort of impersonally, friendly, listening, commentating, welcoming. So it was kind of a breakthrough for me, a realization of my actual feelings.” As Ginsberg was just nineteen, and somewhat adrift, Burroughs does seem to have helped him.

  With all the talk of analysis, and the acting out of “routines,” Bill next attempted to act out the different layers of his own alter ego that his narcoanalysis with Dr. Wolberg had identified. The top personality was easy, that of the distinguished scion of the respectable St. Louis family, so he went straight on to the nervous, possibly lesbian English governess, which once again involved getting up in drag. Ginsberg said that this “was more or less what Burroughs was like naked, when he was in bed making out; that is, kind of prissy, self-conscious, simpering, middle-aged feminine.” As the English governess he was v
ery prim, serving tea, shrieking in a high voice, “My dear, you’re just in time for tea,” and rapping people on the knuckles if they said something untoward: “Don’t say those dirty words in front of everyone.”

  Bill loved acting out the old tobacco farmer, sittin’ on his front porch on the banks of the river watching the catfish go by. He would slowly build his monologue while people held their breath in anticipation. “See that catfish comin’ down the river? Well it’s just like one catfish after another going down. Comes down from there and goes right down here, and I jest sit and watch ’em all day long. Once in a while I get out my fishing tackle and I catch me a catfish. EVER GUT A CATFISH?” And he’d leap up and go completely mad with psychopathic bloodlust with his capping line while everyone roared with laughter.

  Beneath all the personality layers was a silent, starving, skull-headed, yellow-skinned Chinese, crouched on the banks of the muddy Yangtze; a character with no hope, no ideals, no beliefs, and no words, that Bill felt might be his ultimate persona.

  In addition to his experiments in lay analysis, for many months Bill attempted to hypnotize Ginsberg, with no success. They conducted experiments in telepathy, marking crosses and circles and squares on sheets of paper at predetermined times. Ginsberg remembered that “there was a whole year we did that for fun. We would not see each other and match them every two days.”17 This was something that Bill and Joan would do together for many years to come.

  It was inevitable that the other residents of 115th Street would get to know Huncke. Burroughs first took him around in October 1945, thinking that his stories might amuse them. They did, and Huncke made enormous efforts to ingratiate himself into their society, knowing they were all from solid middle-class backgrounds, like himself, and that there was money there. Huncke recalled, “I used to visit there constantly. Sometimes I’d stay overnight. Sometimes I’d cut out, stoned out of my gourd, at the crack of dawn, walk downtown, down to forty-second Street.”18 Jack was particularly intrigued by him, seeing material for his writing: “Then there was Herbert Huncke—he’s the greatest story teller I’ve ever known. I don’t like his ideas about mugging and all that stuff, but he doesn’t do the mugging himself. He’s just a little guy.”19

  Huncke recognized that he had to sing for his supper. “I guess I represented the underworld. They were curious about the underworld and I was certainly much closer to the underworld than they were at that point, such as it was. Well, one thing they all had in common is that they wanted to write. They talked about writing and they knew of writers and so forth. They were very thoroughly trained academically.”20

  Bill also brought round Phil “the Sailor” White, whom he was seeing on a regular basis to get morphine. The Sailor also had a good line in stories, and to the 115th Street group these were romantic, outsider figures, free from the normal constraints of society. In fact they were just self-serving criminals with no thought for other people who would do anything as long as it was to their advantage. Shortly before Burroughs met them, Huncke and Phil White were on board ship; both had merchant marine papers. They stole all the morphine syrettes from the medical supplies in the lifeboats—identical to the ones Burroughs sold them, and probably from the same source—and shot them up. Had the ship been torpedoed and injured men taken to the lifeboats, there would have been no morphine to ease their pain, but no one made a moral judgment about them. They were characters.

  There was a diverting interlude in late 1945 when Huncke was approached by a researcher in Times Square and asked to participate in Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s study on sexual behavior. Huncke immediately asked to be paid and after the usual wrangling was given ten dollars. He was also offered fifty cents for every new subject he could get to do it. Huncke knew an enormous number of people who would be willing, mostly junkies and thieves, and Kinsey and his assistant, Wardell Pomeroy, were thrown out of one hotel because the manager didn’t like the line of seedy-looking people visiting their rooms, suspecting them of dealing drugs. The questionnaire had 521 items, but depending on the subject’s particular experiences, usually only about three hundred questions were asked. Tape recorders did not yet exist and so the answers were taken down by hand. The questions were extremely detailed and the whole thing took about an hour. Bill, Jack, and Allen all agreed to do it. Bill was very interested in the project and was introduced to Dr. Kinsey, but it was Pomeroy who asked the questions. Bill was paid five dollars. After fifty-three hundred men had been interviewed, the findings were published in 1948 as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male21—something of a generalization, as all the participants were white and American.

  Joan and Bill spent hours in Joan’s room, lying on the bed talking. “We had all these really deep conversations about very fundamental things,” Burroughs recalled later, “her intuition was absolutely amazing.”22 Ginsberg had fond memories of spending long hours in Joan’s room talking, with Bill lying on the bed, propped up with pillows, and Joan at his side with her arm around him. Because Bill was so involved with it, Joan tried morphine (she didn’t shoot it), but she hated it. She said it was just awful, she hated the sensation and couldn’t understand how anyone could take it. She had a complete intolerance for opiates. However, as Burroughs drifted deeper into addiction, so Joan took more and more Benzedrine. By Christmas 1945, she was using an entire tube a day. Bill used to line up the empties and shoot them with an air pistol.

  Joan claimed to have very acute hearing and told the others what the Irish couple living in the apartment below were saying. She reported quarrels over the old man’s sexual demands and petty squabbles. Several times they debated whether Joan was a whore, and whether they should report them all to the police as drug addicts. Then one evening she heard a bad quarrel going on and said the man was threatening to stab his wife. She insisted that Jack and Allen, the only ones there, do something. They ran downstairs and pounded on the door. There was no one home. For the past five months Joan had been having auditory hallucinations caused by the amphetamine.23

  Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Joan and Huncke, who was also a heavy user of Benzedrine at that time, had been talking about the effects of atomic radiation and believed (correctly) that radiation caused mutation and skin cancers. They spent hours discussing the radioactive spores that they saw emerging from their flesh and believed that the effects of radiation could be most clearly seen among the nighttime inhabitants of Times Square where the diseased skin and cellular breakdown was illuminated in the brightly lit all-night cafeterias.

  Jack, too, used so much Benzedrine that his health deteriorated. He started to have hallucinations, his hair began to fall out, and one day he looked so deathly pale that Vickie Russell slapped makeup on his face before she would go on the subway with him. Finally, in December, he collapsed with thrombophlebitis, painful swelling of the veins caused by blood clots, and was admitted to Queens General Hospital on the VA program, where he had to lie with his legs up on pillows swathed in hot compresses for several weeks.

  Jack was released to the care of his mother, who was already looking after her husband, Leo. Burroughs went to visit him for dinner; he had been out to Ozone Park before and Mrs. Kerouac had always been civil to him, even though he could tell that she hated him. Allen was forbidden to visit because he was a Jew, and Jack went along with that. Leo’s face was a lifeless gray color and his stomach was purple and swollen hard like a watermelon; every two or three weeks the doctor would come and drain it into a bucket. As soon as Bill entered the room Leo began an anti-Semitic, antiblack diatribe. Bill was appalled: “He was just a horrible mess of a Catholic consciousness.” Back at 115th Street, Jack told Bill and Joan that his mother had put a curse on his father strong enough to kill him. He said that as he lay there dying she would taunt him: “Pretty soon I’m going to be saying, ‘Ya ya ya’ to you, six feet underground!”24 He lived another month after Bill’s visit.

  After his father died, Kerouac turned up at 115th Street with a distant, spaced-out look on his f
ace and said, “You know, Joan, I realize that my mother is the most marvelous woman in the world!” As far as Burroughs was concerned, he was running scared. His mother had killed his father and he was next if he stepped out of line. She wanted him all to herself; she did her best to undermine every relationship he ever had with a woman, including his wives, and tried hard to separate Jack from the pernicious influence of Bill and Allen. As far as Bill was concerned she was a stupid, superstitious, vindictive, hateful Breton peasant: “They know what they want and by God they’re going to get it. They’re just there like a real hunk of hard evil shit.”25 Bill did not disguise his opinion of her. “Jack was under her thumb. A real mama’s boy.”26

  Kerouac was going through a very hard time. His father had made him swear that he would look after his mother after his death, an oath that potentially meant that Jack would have to get a job instead of pursuing his career as a writer and living off her earnings from the shoe factory until he had finished his book and was able to live off his writing. But fortunately she agreed to support him, at least until his book was published, recognizing the power that gave her over him. In fact, Leo’s death focused Jack’s energy and precipitated him into a writing frenzy. Once more using Benzedrine, though in more moderation this time, he began writing a massive Wolfean bildungsroman, The Town and the City, about Lowell and New York, which occupied him until September 1948. Supported by his mother, he prayed each day to Jesus, placed his Bible next to his typewriter, and began a long work session. The final manuscript was indeed Wolfean, with over twelve hundred manuscript pages and more than 300,000 words. It was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1950. He had always known he was a writer, and he had achieved his aim.