by Barry Miles
Meanwhile Bill’s addiction had reached the stage where his monthly allowance did not cover the cost of his drugs. He concentrated instead on getting scripts from doctors, and when that got difficult, he began forging them. Edie’s grandmother had put someone named Morris Martin through medical school, and when he died, he left her some property in Brooklyn. She never threw anything away that might be useful, such as the dead doctor’s prescription pads, which Edie was now using for grocery lists. Phil White talked Bill into forging prescriptions and Bill spent ages practicing a signature in an illegible hand. They used the prescriptions to get junk, but then the others began using Dr. Martin’s pads as well. Then Bill misspelled “Dilaudid,” using two l’s, attracting the attention of the pharmacist. As Edie put it, “some druggist checked and found out that the croaker had croaked.” The inspectors examined the scripts and found they were in different handwriting.
Bill was not surprised when two detectives, Shein and O’Grady, arrived at 115th Street, as Huncke had already been arrested. Bill was charged with violation of Public Health Law 334, giving the wrong name on a prescription. He remembered in Last Words, “(When you see a Jew can an Irishman be far behind?) Just cops. Trying to be as nice as they aren’t. No push. No slap. Just a few snarls from Shein.”27 Bill used them as the models for Hauser and O’Brien in The Naked Lunch. He was taken to the Tombs, fingerprinted, and his mug shot was taken. Bail was set at $1,000. Joan arrived accompanied by Dr. Wolberg; she didn’t have any money, but as a physician, Dr. Wolberg could sign a bond. Bill’s parents were notified and his father flew to New York. Joan told Edie, “The only way I could get him out on bail was to call his psychiatrist and he promptly informed Bill’s family which led to a good deal of unpleasantness.”28 They were very upset. They had not seen Bill for six months and had no idea that he was using drugs. Mote didn’t lecture him, he just said, “It’s a terrible habit.” He got Bill a lawyer, who advised them to get a doctor to say he was under treatment for this “affliction,” as he put it. They secured Dr. Milton Feltenstein, who later almost killed Dylan Thomas with the wrong drugs. He gave Bill a prescription for Demerol but that was all. He was only hired to say he was treating him. Bill was busted in April 1946, but his case would not reach magistrate’s court for two months.
And he still needed money for drugs. He began working as the Sailor’s accomplice as a lush worker, rolling drunks on the subway, known as “working the hole.” The first line of the revised edition of The Soft Machine reads, “I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not do bad.” He acted as a shill and stand-up man for Phil, respectable in his suit and tie, holding his New York Times open, spread wide, while Phil reached behind Bill, his fingers feeling for the inside breast pocket, looking for the man’s wallet, or “poke,” as Phil called it. They would never wait for more than three trains to pass before moving on to another station, but when they found someone slumped, asleep or dead drunk on a bench, they would home in on them. If the drunk opened his eyes, he could see that Bill had both hands on the newspaper and his suspicions were allayed. Huncke wrote, “Somehow there was something ludicrous about a man of Bill’s obvious educational background becoming a business partner with knock-around, knock-down, hard hustling Phil.”29
The partnership did not last long. Bill did not have the stomach for the violence involved. One time the drunk woke up and grabbed them. “Okay you guys, ya been in my pockets, we’re going downtown.” Burroughs remembered, “The Sailor hit him and he fell down, but he was still hanging on to the Sailor and the Sailor said, ‘Get this mooch off of me.’ So I hit him once in the jaw and kicked him once in the ribs. Well, the rib smashed. I had to get outa that, man. I hadda get out of that situation.”30 The next day Bill told Phil he was retiring as a lush worker. “I don’t blame you,” he said.31
Bill’s next move was to go into pushing heroin with Bill Garver, another of Huncke’s criminal friends. William Maynard Garver, known as Bill Gains in Junky and as Old Bull Gaines in Kerouac’s Desolation Angels and Tristessa, was yet another thief from a “good family”: his father was a bank president in Philadelphia. Garver was a tall, thin, distinguished-looking man, with a gaunt face, thinning hair that was turning gray, and a very elegant manner of speech. Burroughs described him as having “a malicious childlike smile that formed a shocking contrast to his eyes which were pale blue, lifeless and old.”32
He had been thrown out of Annapolis Military Academy for drunkenness and received a hundred dollars a month from his father to stay away from the family, the result of some reprehensible occurrence in his youth. Unfortunately this was not quite enough to maintain his drug habit, so he supplemented it by stealing overcoats from the coatracks in restaurants and coffee shops, which he then pawned. He could get ten to fourteen dollars for a good hundred-dollar overcoat, but he had to travel to the farthest reaches of the city to pawn them, otherwise the pawnbrokers would have turned him in. He recruited all his friends and acquaintances to help out, giving them a percentage of the deal. Allen Ginsberg liked to watch him in action and even sold one of the pawn tickets to Eugene, his lawyer brother. Garver first met Huncke when he was allocated a bed next to his in the dormitory of Rikers Island jail where Huncke was doing three months for robbery. Huncke suggested that he look up Burroughs when he got out, as they were of similar background and interests.
Garver had a ten-dollar-a-week room on the fifth floor of Hotel Globe, a theatrical hotel at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, very convenient for Bickford’s and Horn & Hardart on 42nd Street where he scored his heroin. He had the same utter callousness as Huncke: when he worked as a medical orderly in a mental hospital during the war he substituted milk sugar for the morphine given to help patients in pain. He saw nothing wrong in it: “After all, they’re crazy anyway. They don’t know the difference.”33 In fact, he delighted in schadenfreude, getting pleasure from others’ misfortune. Burroughs wrote that Garver “was one of the few junkies who really took a special pleasure in seeing non-users get a habit. […] [He] liked to invite young kids up to his room and give them a shot […] and then watch the effects, smiling his little smile.” Burroughs liked him nonetheless.
Garver had an Italian connection on the Lower East Side who sold them a quarter ounce for ninety dollars. They cut it one-third with milk sugar and put it in one-grain caps that they sold for two dollars each, retail. They were offering the best deal on the street as their caps were about 16 percent pure. They got about eighty caps out of a quarter ounce because their connection constantly gave them a short count. Burroughs now spent hours at a time in cafeterias and bars, waiting, watching, until his customers found him. It was all used later, to great effect, in The Soft Machine, where his powers of observation, his delight in the underworld characters of his acquaintance, and their names and parlance outweigh the harrowing descriptions of junk sickness and kicking:
There is a boy sitting at the counter thin-faced kid his eyes all pupil. I see he is hooked and sick. Familiar face maybe from the pool hall where I scored for tea sometime. Somewhere in grey strata of subways all-night cafeterias rooming house flesh. His eyes flickered the question. I nodded toward my booth. He carried his coffee over and sat down opposite me.34
Bill’s case came before the magistrate early in June 1946. Bill was there with his lawyer and Dr. Feltenstein, but the doctor wasn’t even called. It was a first offense, a misdemeanor; obtaining narcotics by the use of fraud. The judge made a joke of it, and said he was going to inflict a terrible punishment on him. “I’m going to sentence you to go back to St. Louis for the summer. Which is terrible.” To make a disposition of the case, he said Bill was on general probation, but there was no suspended sentence. Bill walked free. He went straight to the U.S. Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, to take the cure. They gave him a reduction cure, using Dolophine, a brand of methadone, but he only stayed ten days, so he was not completely cured. Joan was pleased for him and wrote Edie, “That was pretty good of course, but it left me
in rather a spot, emotionally as well as financially.”35
Even before Burroughs was sent to St. Louis, the apartment at 115th Street had been going downhill. Now it took a turn for the worse. Hal Chase left to spend the summer in Denver, intending to room in Livingston Hall on campus when he returned, leaving just Allen and Joan to share the rent. Huncke moved into Hal’s room. He and Phil White began using the place to stash weapons and stolen goods. A gum machine was brought up and broken open, so they all had free gum for a week. They borrowed Bill’s blackjack and his gun to use in robberies, and hid their own “piece” there. After Bill left for St. Louis, things got worse and worse. Fritz the elevator man told Huncke, “It’s all right you steal the stuff in the cars, but don’t bring the car here and leave it in front of the building!” As Burroughs said, “It wasn’t very smart. No wonder Huncke did so much time. One time they’d made a good haul, they’d gotten away clean, then the other guy says, ‘Huncke, we missed some stuff, let’s go back.’ He went back for five years. Imagine anyone being as stupid as that? Huncke said, ‘I didn’t want to go back,’ but he let the other guy talk him into it. It’s completely stupid. The basic stupidity of the criminal mind.”36
Then one time, Phil got very high on goofballs—a pentobarbital sold under the brand name of Nembutal—took Bill’s .32, and set out to hold up a store. He asked Huncke if he was coming, but Huncke could see the deranged state he was in and wisely declined. Phil burst into a furrier’s showroom, pulled his gun, and demanded money. Phil shot the furrier in the stomach, killing him in cold blood. The New York Journal-American headline read, “Mad Dog Noonday Killer.” He and Huncke dismantled the gun and scattered bits of it all over Brooklyn. Years later, in May 1951, Phil was picked up on a junk offense, and in order to reduce his sentence he squealed on a pusher. While in the Tombs, awaiting transfer to another jail, he hanged himself. He knew what happened to informers. He would be beaten, tortured, and possibly even killed when he reached a regular prison. Unable to face years of fear and violence, he killed himself. Bill wrote Allen, “I was sincerely shocked to hear about Phil. He was so uncompromising and Puritanical about stool pigeons. He used to say: ‘I can’t understand how a pigeon can live with himself.’ I guess Phil couldn’t after what he did.”37 He told Allen, “It was quite a shock to me as I always thought a lot of him.”38
Huncke introduced Joan to a friend of his, known as Whitey because of his white-blond hair, and she began living with him, “that sweet but stupid character with whom I was having a light affair at the time,” as she described him to Edie.39 Jack stopped by one day to see how she was and found her “out of her mind” on Benzedrine. She came in and immediately stripped off her clothes. Jack said, “Joan, what are you doing?” Joan said, “Who are you, strange man, get out of this house.” Confused, Kerouac pleaded with her, “I’m not a strange man, Joan, I’m Jack!” She started yelling at Huncke, “Jack is trying to rape me!” but Huncke just lay in bed, saying, “Well ba-by, I don’t know what to do,” and “I’m all hung up baby, I…” In the end Joan went into Huncke’s room to discuss it and shut the door. Jack fled.40 Allen, meanwhile, was engrossed in a ten-page, amphetamine-driven introduction to his enormous poem “Death in Violence,” as the apartment disintegrated around him.
Joan wrote Edie, “After a while we began taking in a few desperate characters as boarders and before long I was running quite a pad. Everything in the damn place was hot, as were of course, a couple of cars parked out front. Inevitably people kept going to jail.”41 When the police arrived at 115th Street with the victim of a suitcase crime, he identified Huncke, who was promptly arrested because he had in his pocket the keys to a stolen car parked right outside. He soon found himself in the Bronx jail. Joan was evicted for nonpayment of rent and she and Julie and Whitey began living in a series of sleazy hotels; there were no apartments available in the city. Then Whitey was arrested, caught trying to crack the safe at a Howard Johnson’s, leaving Joan alone and broke. He got five to ten years in Sing Sing. A gay black friend of Huncke’s named William “Spence” Spencer took her in at his apartment at 250 West 47th Street. It was a nice place with a huge record collection, but the neighbors took up a petition against him and got him evicted for too much traffic to his apartment. Joan was almost at the end of her tether. Kingsland ran into her that October and wrote to Edie Parker, “I saw Joan last weekend. She seemed to be losing her mind. It’s a shame, don’t you think?” Shortly afterward Joan cracked up completely and was picked up wandering around Times Square. She was admitted to Bellevue Hospital suffering from acute amphetamine psychosis—the first female case on record—and they kept her there for ten days. Her father came from Loudonville to get Julie.
BOOK THREE
Down Mexico Way
Chapter Thirteen
I never saw any place in Texas I want to see again given the fact of Texans there.1
1. Farmer Bill
Bill’s parents were very concerned. His uncle Horace had been a morphine addict and he had ended up slitting his wrists. They complained and cajoled, but could never understand why Bill was doing it. Burroughs said they were “compassionate and understanding, a mixed reaction.” Upon arrival in St. Louis, he was delighted to find his old school and Harvard friend Kells Elvins there.
Kells was back from serving as a marine in the Pacific theater, where he had lost the hearing in one ear thanks to a Japanese shell. He told Bill his war stories, which were filed in Burroughs’s writer’s memory. Kells’s radio code name was Big Picture, and his colonel was called Shifty Shaeffer. He had just hit the beach with Major Ash, whose radio name was Clinker, and there was a lot of machine-gun fire. Kells tugged at Ash’s trouser leg, urging him to get down. At that point machine-gun fire took off the top of Major Ash’s head. Colonel Shaeffer called on the radio and said, “Howya Elvins. Put Major Ash on the phone.” Elvins delivered the memorable line: “Big Picture calling Shifty, Clinker is dead.” Throughout the mid-sixties Burroughs did scores of cut-ups on the theme of the Clinker Squadron, and Shaeffer became a doctor in The Naked Lunch.
Kells was a macho Rhett Butler figure, a heavy drinker, virile, enormously attractive to women, good-looking, with deep black eyes, curly, wiry brown hair, and strong, well-defined features. He was well built, athletic, and was described by his son Peter to Rob Johnson as “an alcoholic playboy of the Western World.” His second wife, Marianne Woofe, described him as “charismatic, cultured, well-read in many fields. He had a superb vocabulary and he was like the Pied Piper when he spoke, holding everyone spellbound with every word and gesture. He was the most graceful man I ever met.” But his wife also saw a downside. He was “alcoholic, volatile, and had a sadistic side. […] He did not really like women. He required them, but didn’t like them; he had no close woman friends.”2 Kells had always been on Bill’s wavelength, particularly his humor, and thought he was the funniest person he knew.
In St. Louis the old camaraderie kicked in, and they immediately began thinking up crazy moneymaking schemes. Burroughs told Kerouac that he was variously engaged in patent medicines and household appliances. It seems that the Food and Drug Administration, established in 1907 to control patent medicines, took a dim view of Bill and Kells’s “Death County Bill’s Tooth and Bone Tablets from the County Without a Toothache.” Deaf Smith County, near Amarillo, was famous for the high lime and phosphate in the water, and it was said that the lime built up under your fillings and pushed them out. Whether Bill’s medicine ever existed or not, it was a good example of their thinking. They also came up with a fluorescent mouthwash for dentists and a home dry-cleaning machine, the research and development of which destroyed the washing machine belonging to a friend of Kells’s mother. Kells’s influence helped Bill to continue his cure. He wrote Joan, “Off the habit. Kells wanted to associate only with dynamic people, and I’m forced to admit that junk seriously hampers my dynamism.”3
Kells’s father, Politte, owned property in the Rio Grande Valley in S
outh Texas, and had moved there in 1936. Kells followed him and had bought ten acres of citrus groves and a hundred acres with cotton allotments for $5,000 near his father’s land. He suggested that Bill join him and they would both make some money as cotton farmers. You couldn’t really lose with cotton farming because there was a government wartime support price of $150 a bale that was still in place, and allotments went with the land. It was a bizarre situation, because no matter how good a piece of land was, without allotments it was virtually worthless until the end of the war; the price of cotton went from nine cents a pound in 1940 ($45 a bale) to thirty-two cents a pound ($160 a bale) in 1947. Bill’s parents, who knew both Kells and his parents, were delighted with the idea and advanced him enough money to buy fifty acres of “the finest land in the Valley,” complete with cotton allotments.
The Rio Grande debouches into the Gulf of Mexico just outside Brownsville, Texas. Across the river is Matamoros, in Mexico. A strip of land known as the Valley, twenty miles across and a hundred miles long, extends upriver from Brownsville as far as Rio Grande City. Thanks entirely to the massive irrigation system begun in 1904, it is now some of the richest farmland in the United States. Before that it was a desert of mesquite and cactus. There were no proper towns in the Valley in the forties, just a “vast suburb of flimsy houses” surrounded by endless fields of citrus. Burroughs was not flattering in his description of it: “The whole Valley has the impermanent look of a camp, or carnival. Soon the suckers will all be dead and the pitchmen will go somewhere else. […] A premonition of doom hangs over the Valley. You have to make it now before something happens, before the black fly ruins the citrus, before support prices are taken off the cotton. […] The threat of disaster is always there.”4 There was always the disquieting knowledge that it was once desert and will be desert again, just as soon as the pumps are turned off.
